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Archaeology from Space with Pl...
Archaeology from Space with Pléiades Neo
In 2022, Airbus Defence & Space Intelligence launched the Pléiades Neo Challenge, a call for projects offering free access to Pléiades Neo imagery.
AOrOC was selected to develop its project “Geo-archaeology and Palaeo-Landscape of Important Egyptian Nile Delta Ancient Cities with Pléiades Neo”, using an innovative way to develop the archaeological application.
Challenge
Tanis is an important archaeological site in the North-Eastern Delta of the Nile where we can find :
• Ruins of an ancient royal capital city and inland harbor erected in the late 2nd millennium BC along the ancient Tanitic Nile branch ;
• Temples crafted from massive stone remnants from Avaris & Piramesse monuments, two other important royal cities and harbours of previous periods located 20km away along the neighbouring Nile branch (Pelusiac), who were abandoned due to partial silting ;
• Ancient rivers and canals now mostly silted up but traces can sometimes be detected in modern hydrography and micro variations of the ground surface topography.
Today’s Bahr Faqus drain might be the last avatar of an ancient waterway used for moving the heavy stone elements from Piramesse to Tanis.
In this scenario, the challenge is to validate this hypothesis using highly precise 3D information on the surface topography in the considered area.
Our Solution
The first step of the AOrOC project was to acquire Pléiades Neo tri-stereo images from November 2022, covering an area of 106km2.
Pléiades Neo imagery helped to produce high-quality false-colour DSM (Digital Surface Model) and true-colour orthophotography showing:
• Ancient hydrographic features on a regional scale (levees of the Pelusiac branch; no contradiction to possible ancient waterway towards Tanis) ;
• Detailed archaeological features at the scale of the Tanis site (levelled ancient domestic constructions).
The production of a false-colour DSM was instrumental in the development of a high-precision contour map for the Tanis site.
Benefits
Pléiades Neo an alternative to Airborne LIDAR
Pléiades Neo satellite imagery proved to be a convenient alternative to Airborne LIDAR (now difficult to implement in Egypt) for producing very high-resolution ortho-images and DSMs.
High precision data
The amount of high-precision data was useful for regional geo-archaeological and local archaeological interpretation.
Moreover, Pléiades Neo imagery could detect small features not visible on RGB images (DSM) or underlying features (NDWI2).
A great perspective for future research
Sharing the results with other archaeological missions operating in the area, such as Austrian and German teams working in Avaris and Piramesse, can provide valuable insights for future research and interpretation.
AOrOC is a research unit merging nine teams from several institutions (i.e: CNRS, PSL) specialized in archaeology, history, philology and digital humanities, in the Antiquity round the Mediterranean
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