Sayantani Neogi will be in Glasgow tomorrow to present in the 2024 BANEA Annual Meeting, hosted by The University of Glasgow on the 3-5 January 2024.
Organised around “Archaeological and heritage practice in Southwest Asia: towards equitable futures”, the conference will foreground archaeology’s role and responsibilities in climate change discourse; the discipline’s colonial inheritances and legacies, and strategies for addressing and mitigating them; and equitable and sustainable archaeological, cultural heritage, and community engagement practice.
Scopes of working in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley Using a Combined Remote Sensing and Geoarchaoelogical Approach
Sayantani Neogi, Francesc Conesa and Hector Orengo
Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICAC-CERCA), Tarragona, Spain
This paper presents the scopes of the project SIGNATURE working in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. This ongoing Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project intends to combine big Earth Observation data, machine learning and geoarchaeological signatures of anthropogenic soils in high-performance computational workflows to push forward our capabilities to identify, characterise and protect endangered cultural soilscapes in this post-conflict region.
The Bekaa Valley, with its fertile alluvial plains within the Litani and Orontes rivers, has been an attractive land to the populations through millennia. The settlers benefited from the valley orography, the alternate of pasture and agricultural lands and the availability of water sources. As an aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War and the instability resulting from military conflicts, the traditional agronomic landscapes of the Bekaa Valley were severely transformed.
This paper shows initial ideas about how the Bekaa Valley now offers an optimal scenario to investigate endangered cultural soilscapes through accurate detection, mapping, and prediction of the location of vulnerable archaeological sites and landforms. Integration of remote sensing techniques starting with the recompilation of legacy data in the form such reports, databases, grey literature, as well as geospatial legacy data such as CORONA and HEXAGON imagery can be promising for further such research in the region.
Sayantani Neogi is a MSCA postdoctoral fellow with the project “SIGNATURE: Mapping endangered cultural soilscapes in post-conflict regions through Big Earth Observation Data, artificial intelligence and geoarchaeological signatures. (HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01. num. 101067100).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
