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Journal of Archaeological Science

Volume 155, July 2023, 105777
Journal of Archaeological Science

Accelerating the discovery of new Nasca geoglyphs using deep learning

Author links open overlay panelMasato Sakai ^a ^1, Yiru Lai ^b ^1, 
Jorge Olano Canales ^c, Masao Hayashi ^b ^1, Kohhei Nomura ^b
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Abstract

We discuss an archaeological research of employing deep learning (DL)
based object detection on high-resolution aerial photographs to
discover Nasca geoglyphs, which have been designated as a UNESCO
World Heritage Site. Owing to extremely limited archaeological ground
truth data and their differences in scale and design, it is difficult
to detect new geoglyphs merely training DL on the known geoglyphs.
Therefore, we developed a pipeline of DL to mine such data and
address the challenges unique to archaeology. With this approach, we
identified four new geoglyphs in the northern area of the Nasca
Pampa, namely: a humanoid, a pair of legs, a fish, and a bird. The
geoglyphs got verified through on-site surveys. We could identify new
geoglyph's candidates approximately 21 times faster than with the
naked eye alone. The approach would be beneficial for the future of
archaeology in a new paradigm of combining field survey and AI.

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Keywords

Nasca
Geoglyph
High-resolution aerial photograph
Remote sensing
Deep learning
Object detection
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Cited by (0)

^1

    These authors contributed equally to this work.

(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

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