AI-ming backwards: Vanishing archaeological landscapes in Mesopotamia and automatic detection of sites on CORONA imagery

Abstract

By upgrading an existing deep learning model with the knowledge provided by one of the oldest sets of grayscale satellite imagery, known as CORONA, we improved the AI model’s attitude towards the automatic identification of archaeological sites in an environment which has been completely transformed in the last five decades, including the complete destruction of many of those same sites. The initial Bing-based convolutional network model was re-trained using CORONA satellite imagery for the district of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, central Mesopotamian floodplain. The results were twofold and surprising. First, the detection precision obtained on the area of interest increased sensibly: in particular, the Intersection-over-Union (IoU) values, at the image segmentation level, surpassed 85%, while the general accuracy in detecting archeological sites reached 90%. Second, our re-trained model allowed the identification of four new sites of archaeological interest (confirmed through field verification), previously not identified by archaeologists with traditional techniques. This has confirmed the efficacy of using AI techniques and the CORONA imagery from the 1960s to discover archaeological sites currently no longer visible, a concrete breakthrough with significant consequences for the study of landscapes with vanishing archaeological evidence induced by anthropization.