24/09/2012
Opening lecture by Jesse Casana (Univ. of Arkansas)
In many parts of the world, urban expansion, agricultural intensification and reservoir construction over the past several decades have radically transformed the landscape and resulted in the widespread destruction of archaeological sites and features. These changes mean that modern satellite imagery—even at very high spatial resolution—reveals on a portion of the archaeological record that was extant a few decades ago.
Fortunately, declassified, Cold War-era satellite images known as CORONA, the codename for the United States’ first intelligence satellite program, offer high-resolution, global stereo imagery dating from 1960-1972. Because CORONA preserves a picture of the landscape prior to much recent development, these images constitute a truly unique resource for archaeological prospection and land use/cover change analysis. However, unprocessed CORONA images contain extreme spatial distortions caused by a cross-path panoramic scanning system, and the absence of detailed orientation and camera information makes correction of these errors challenging, resulting in small-scale, piecemeal application of this resource.
Following a discussion of the history of the CORONA program, this talk will overview our research team’s development of new, efficient orthorectification methods for KH-4A and KH-4B CORONA imagery. We have now used these methods to correct more than 1500 images covering the Middle East and surrounding regions, and we have created a freely-accessible, online database for viewing and distribution of images. This regional-scale, high-resolution image archive reveals a remarkable record of landscape transformation in the Middle East as well as tens of thousands of previously undocumented archaeological sites and features such as roads, canals and field systems. Our ongoing research is now deploying this regional-scale CORONA coverage of the Middle East to facilitate the discovery of archaeological landscapes and the documentation of environmental change, beyond survey boundaries and across national borders.
