New frontier in archaeology
For decades, working as an archaeologist meant being, as Jason Ur, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, puts it, “the guy with the muddy boots.” Ur and researchers like him may soon be able to avoid some of that mud, however, thanks to a system he developed that uses computers to scour satellite images for telltale clues of human habitation. Already, he said, the system has uncovered thousands of potential ancient settlements that might reveal clues to the earliest complex human societies. As described in a paper published March 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ur worked with Bjoern Menze, a research affiliate in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, to create software that uses a series of factors — including soil discolorations and the distinctive mounding that results from the collapse of mud-brick homes — to identify ancient settlements. Armed with that profile,...