The expansive scale and inaccessible nature of archaeological landscapes in the Australian Arid Zonev provide a significant challenge for cultural heritage management. These areas, such as the Strzelecki Desert, are also home to a complex mosaic of stakeholders including petroleum companies, pastoralists, Traditional Owners, and National Parks who require large-scale, high-quality affordable mapping of archaeological landscapes in order to make informed management decisions. This project will undertake an extensive trial of high-resolution remote sensing methods to map key geomorphic features to inform our understanding of archaeological potential, chronology, and depositional history.

The use of remote sensing data to map archaeological and geomorphic features of interest in arid zone archaeology in Australia is rare but has shown great potential (Law et al. 2017, Law et al. 2019, Law et al. 2021). The use of machine learning approaches to automatically detect geomorphic features in other locations based on elevation (ie. Orengo et al. 2020) or multispectral (ie. Orengo and Petrie 2017) data has shown significant potential.

This project will form part of Associate Professor Ian Moffat’s Australian Research Council-funded Future Fellowship working in the Simpson Desert and the Coongie Lakes in collaboration with the Yandruwandha Yawarrawarrka and Wangkangurru Yarluyandi Traditional Owners. In addition to working with Associate Professor Moffat, Oliver Hatswell will receive high-level supervision from Dr Jarrad Kowlessar from Flinders University and Professor Hector Orengo from the Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology who are international experts in the fields of archaeological remote sensing and machine learning.