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Intelligent Archaeological Mapping of Long-Term Settlement in Punjab

Project description

Uncovering the dynamics of human settlement in ancient India

The territory of the modern Punjab state has been extensively inhabited since ancient times. Despite this, neighbouring regions have been explored much more thoroughly. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions IArchMap project aims to develop a new workflow to develop archaeological regional surveys by applying machine learning methods to historical maps, multitemporal multisource satellite data and high-resolution imagery from drones. Thanks to these methods and data, archaeologists will be able to quickly and accurately map and characterise information on early human settlements across large areas. The project will ultimately shed new light on the historical settlement dynamics of this area and the Indus region overall. It will also benefit the management and preservation of cultural heritage.

Objective

Intelligent Archaeological Mapping of Long-Term Settlement in Punjab (IArchMap) will develop a new workflow for the development of archaeological regional surveys through the application of machine learning methods to historical maps, multitemporal multisource satellite data and drone-acquired high-resolution imagery. These will be tested and complemented by field ground-truthing and analysis of field material. This new methodological approach will allow archaeologists to map atand characterise information on past human settlement over large areas with an unprecedent speed and accuracy.
IArchMap will complement site detection methods with data on landscape change that might have impacted human settlement and the formation and preservation of the archaeological record.
IArchMap design is based in a combination of experimental approaches currently in development by the supervisor and the host research group. The Actions training will provide the researcher with the capacities required to implement those approaches in a single workflow for the first time. The research previous experience and expertise will provide ground-truthing data and an interpretative background to evaluate the projects data contribution to current historical debates.
The selected regional case-study, the territory of the modern Punjab State (India) has been intensively settled since prehistory, but it has been significantly less explored than neighbouring regions. The projects results will represent a significant step-forward in the knowledge on the historical settlement dynamics of the study area and the Indus Region in general; and will benefit its Cultural Heritage management and preservation. Methods and data employed for IArchMap will be freely accessible, which opens the possibility to apply them to other regions of South Asia and elsewhere.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Coordinator

Institut Català d'Arqueologia Clàssica
Net EU contribution
€ 165 312,96
Address
Plaça Rovellat s/n
43003 Tarragona
Spain

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Este Cataluña Tarragona
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