During a pioneering aerial survey of the Near East in the 1920s, Father Antoine Poidebard recorded hundreds of fortified military buildings that traced the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire. Based on their distribution, Poidebard proposed that these forts represented a line of defence against incursions from the east. Utilising declassified images from the CORONA and HEXAGON spy satellite programmes, the authors report on the identification of a further 396 forts widely distributed across the northern Fertile Crescent. The addition of these forts questions Poidebard's defensive frontier thesis and suggests instead that the structures played a role in facilitating the movement of people and goods across the Syrian steppe.

During the early fifth millennium BC, Linearbandkeramik groups along the Danube in Central Europe constructed hundreds of circular enclosures, or ‘rondels’. These monumental sites signalled major social, economic and ideological change among these early farming communities. Their absence north of the Carpathian and Sudeten Mountains has been taken to suggest that this area lay on the periphery of this Early Neolithic world. Here, the authors report on a systematic programme of non-invasive prospection, including aerial photography, in Lower Silesia. The survey has identified eight previously undocumented rondels, significantly extending their distribution. Their detection emphasises the importance of combining prospection methods, and calls for a re-evaluation of core-periphery interpretations of Early Neolithic Central Europe.

Coastal dunes along Lake Michigan's eastern shoreline are a unique system comprising perhaps the largest complex of freshwater coastal dunes in the world. Here, we examine the blowouts in this region and determine how they have evolved since the 1930s. We conducted a spatiotemporal analysis of 435 blowouts by comparing repeat aerial images of the coast beginning in 1938. Using an unsupervised machine learning classification known as iso-clustering, we mapped blowout morphologies at three timestamps: 1938, 1986–1988, and 2018. We then compared the blowout geographies through a technique known as a spatial-temporal analysis of moving polygons (STAMP) model, which allowed us to analyze how each blowout changed in time and space. Results show blowouts have contracted ~37% in size since 1938, mostly at the expense of vegetation, with many fragmenting. These findings comport with other regional and global studies detailing a trend in coastal dune stabilization from vegetation and suggest that an increase in precipitation or other environment drivers could be responsible. Moreover, we detected no new blowouts since 1938 along the ~500 km shoreline or on any of the Lake Michigan islands. This suggests blowouts here are artifacts of premodern conditions, perhaps the result of prior stormier or drier eras.

This contribution presents the first overview of an integrated remote-sensing survey undertaken across Harpham Roman Villa, East Yorkshire, and its wider landscape setting. The survey revealed one of the largest Roman courtyard complexes in northern Britain, nestled within an impressive crossroads system that formed part of a multiphase ‘ladder settlement’. The paper considers the impact of the results on both our understanding of this unique landscape and broader methodological approaches to the study of rural settlement in Roman Britain.

Taking a landscape-based approach, the Aurifer Tagus project has demonstrated the significance of gold mining in the Roman province of Lusitania. New radiocarbon dates reveal the foundation, use and abandonment of the Covão do Urso and Mina da Presa mining sites. Combined with ancient literature, this evidence sheds light on the territory's organisation and the evolution of its social structure.

The Canterbury Hinterland Project (CHP) has combined aerial photographic and LiDAR analysis, synthesis of HER and other data across east Kent with targeted survey south and east of Canterbury. We present possible hillforts, temples, large enclosures, a major trackway, linking paths, burials and high-status Roman-period complexes and argue that people organised the landscape to communicate meaning in two main ways: a ‘public’ face oriented towards the Dover–Canterbury road and expressions of ritual and remembrance for local groups. The character of this rural population has traditionally been understood in terms of its relationship to the civitas capital and villas; we look beyond this to examine a more detailed vision of possible social interactions.

As the centenary commemorations of the Battle of Passchendaele approach, this article is a timely demonstration of how archaeology can provide new insights into the landscape of the Western Front. Assessment of over 9000 aerial photographs taken during the First World War, integrated with other approaches to landscape archaeology, offers a new perspective on the shifting nature of the historic struggle around the town of Ypres in Belgium. The results not only illustrate the changing face of the landscape over that four-year period, but also highlight the potential of aerial photographic records to illuminate hitherto overlooked aspects of landscape heritage.

Aerial photography was conducted in the high Arctic Ocean during a Chinese research expedition in summer 2010. By partitioning the images into three distinct surface categories (sea ice/snow, water and melt ponds), the areal fraction of each category, ice concentration and the size and geometry of individual melt ponds, are determined with high-spatial resolution. The ice concentration and melt pond coverage have large spatial deviations between flights and even between images from the marginal ice zone to the pack ice zone in the central Arctic. Ice concentration and pond coverage over high Arctic (from 84°N to north) was ~75% and ~6.8%, respectively, providing ‘ground truth’ for the unusual transpolar reduction strip of ice indicated concurrently by AMSR-E data and for the regions (north of 88°N) where no passive microwave sensors can cover. Melt pond size and shape distributions are examined in terms of pond area (S), perimeter (P), mean caliper dimension (MCD) (L), roundness (R), convex degree (C), the ratio of P/S and fractal dimension (D). Power-law relationships are developed between pond size and number. Some general trends in geometric metrics are identified as a function of pond area including R, C, P/S and D. The scale separation of pond complexity is demonstrated by analyzing area-perimeter data. The results will potentially help the modelling of melt pond evolution and the determination of heterogeneity of under-ice transmitted light fields.

With the commemoration of World War I (WWI) under way, a preliminary stocktaking can be made of archaeological research into the physical remains of this war. The question is to what extent the perspective on the study of WWI heritage, and consequently the way in which archaeological research into WWI remains has been conducted, has evolved over the last ten years. Are relics from WWI seen as a legitimate subject of inquiry or does its archaeology as a discipline still strive for recognition? This paper deals with the practices surrounding WWI archaeology in Flanders, Belgium, as well as the (methodological) problems concerning the study of WWI archaeological remains, based on the reports resulting from fieldwork carried out by professional archaeologists.

The new generation of aerial photographers is using different wavelengths to sense archaeological features. This is effective but can be expensive. Here the authors use data already collected for environmental management purposes, and evaluate it for archaeological prospection on pasture. They explore the visibility of features in different seasons and their sensitivity to different wavelengths, using principal components analysis to seek out the best combinations. It turns out that this grassland gave up its secrets most readily in January, when nothing much was growing, and overall the method increased the number of known sites by a good margin. This study is of the greatest importance for developing the effective survey of the world's landscape, a quarter of which is under grass.

The early Neolithic rondel is a large curvilinear ditched and palisaded enclosure found in increasing numbers in Central Europe. It has close links with the tells of the Danube region, themselves highly suggestive instruments of the earliest Neolithic. Here the authors extend the distribution of rondels further to the north-east, with the discovery and verification of the first example in Poland. As they point out, it is aerial photography that made this advance possible and we can expect many more discoveries, given appropriate investment in the art.

Scullin and Murray monoliths are thought to hold the largest concentration of breeding seabirds in East Antarctica. The monoliths were designated as an Antarctic Specially Protected Area (ASPA No. 164) in 2005 in recognition of the global importance of the seabird assemblages and to protect their outstanding ecological and scientific values. The management plan for the Scullin and Murray Monoliths ASPA encourages regular seabird population monitoring using methods such as aerial photography, but the complex logistics of accessing this remote site has until now limited quantitative assessment of the seabird populations to a single survey in 1986/87. In December 2010 we photographed the Adélie penguin population to provide the population counts presented here. We discuss the potential biases and uncertainties in estimating the breeding population from both the recent and 1980s population count data.

Aerial photography is so fundamental an instrument of modern archaeology that we often take it for granted. But its methods are surprisingly specific and its most important experimental theatre was probably the territory of the Levant—and especially the rocky terrain of Jordan. The author, a prominent aerial archaeologist of our own day, takes time off to review the achievements of the pioneers, serving officers who established routes over the desert to deliver mail between Egypt and Iraq. The fabulous ancient landscape they discovered could only be appreciated through the low-level window provided by these slow-moving rickety machines and their intrepid pilots. In these days of jet travel, the precious basalt landscape is in danger of slipping off the agenda again—both for researchers and conservers.

The authors assess the potential contribution of lidar surveys to national inventories of archaeological resources (‘Historic Environment Records’), and compare the relative costs and sensitivity of lidar and aerial photography.

The First World War left its mark on the ground surface of Europe as perhaps no other human catastrophe before or since. The author applies modern digital mapping technology to the aerial photographs taken by the intrepid early pilots, and creates a landscape of military works that would not have been known in detail to either historians or generals at the time. The GIS inventory has great potential for historians of the war and is a vital instrument for the management of this increasingly important heritage.

In central Amazonian white-water floodplains (várzea), different forest types become established in relation to the flood-level gradient. The formations are characterized by typical patterns of species composition, and their architecture results in different light reflectance patterns, which can be detected by Landsat TM image data. Ground checking comprised a detailed forest inventory of 4 ha, with Digital Elevation Models (DEM) being generated for all sites. The results indicate that, at the average flood level of 3 m, species diversity and architecture of the forests changes, thus justifying the classification into the categories of low várzea (várzea baixa) and high várzea (várzea alta). In a first step to scale up, the study sites were observed by aerial photography. Tree heights, crown sizes, the projected crown area coverage and the gap frequencies provide information, which confirms a remotely sensed classification into three different forest types. The structure of low várzea depends on the successional stage, and species diversity increases with increasing age of the formations. In high várzea, only one successional stage was found and species diversity is higher than in all low-várzea formations. The more complex architecture of the high-várzea forest results in a more diffuse behaviour pattern in pixel distribution, when scanned by TM image data.

The megalithic monuments of Carnac, Brittany, in the Département of the Morbihan, are amongst the most farnous in France. indeed in the world. This region has not only the densest conccntration of such sites in Europe but also retained its importance as a centre of monument-building from the late 5th to the :jrd millennium FK:, giving it a unique significance in the study of Neolithic landscapes (Sherratt 1990; 1998). Its menhirs, stone alignments, and megalithic tombs have attracted the attention of scholars since the 18th century, and there is thus an unusually full record, both written and pictorial, of the nature of these monuments as they were perceived over 300 years.

Reconnaissance on the southern edge of the Massif Central is studying field evidence which deepens appreciation of the present-day upland French landscape as not only ‘sauvage’ but also the product of long-term use.