Multispectral archaeological prospection: a case study in the Dinar region, central western Turkey

The aim of this work is to explore a method of archaeological site prospection using satellite-collected multispectral imagery in order to provide the archaeological community with a comprehensive, quantitative case study of an efficient tool to survey archaeological landscapes in the Near East and beyond. To that end, after a brief introduction a review of previous predictive modelling and satellite imagery applications in archaeology is presented to provide context to the methodological approach taken here. This is followed by a discussion of site detection, prediction, recovery and interpretation in order to consider problematic issues that might arise during each of these phases and negatively impact results; based on this foundation, a method of multispectral archaeological prospection is proposed. Next the primary case study region of the Dinar Basin in central western Turkey is presented in terms of the physical geography and palaeoclimatology as well as known settlement and inter-regional interaction from prehistory to the present to provide archaeological context to the study region and to better understand what might be expected in the archaeological record, what impact later settlement systems might have had on earlier ones, and how this might affect the proposed method of multispectral site detection and prediction. With this foundation, the methodology is applied and the results tested in the field with initial results presented; a consideration of settlement location relative to a number of variables reflecting the local environment and the sites’ relation to it, along with a consideration of the surface artefacts and overall surface artefact densities seen at the discovered sites, closes the analysis as a first interpretation of the site location results. Following on, the portability of this multispectral approach to site detection is tested in two other regions of the Near East, in the environs of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey and Ur in southern Iraq. Finally, the results of all of the work above are considered and discussed together to assess the validity and achievements of the research, and the conclusion outlines possible future directions to build on the work presented here. Volume two provides the associated tables and figures and an appendix detailing all of the previously known and newly recorded sites and findspots in the Dinar Basin