Archaeological land use characterization using multispectral remote sensing data

Much of human history can be traced through the impacts of human actions upon the environment. The use of remote sensing technology offers the archeologist the opportunity to detect these impacts which are often invisible to the naked eye. The extraction of remote sensing signatures from a particular geographical region allows the generation of geophysical signature maps; this can be achieved using an accurate and recently developed multispectral image classification approach based on pixel statistics for the class description, which is referred to as the Weighted Pixel Statistics method. This paper presents the prospective study for archaeological land use characterization using multispectral remote sensing data provided by SPOT-5 imagery. The results obtained with this study probe the efficiency of the classification technique.