On the Use of Google Earth Engine and Sentinel Data to Detect 'Lost' Sections of Ancient Roads. The Case of Via Appia

The currently available tools and services as open and free cloud resources to process big satellite data opened up a new frontier of possibilities and applications including archeological research. These new research opportunities also pose several challenges to be faced, as, for example, the data processing and interpretation. This letter is about the assessment of different methods and data sources to support a visual interpretation of EO imagery. Multitemporal Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 data sets have been processed to assess their capability in the detection of buried archeological remains related to some lost sections of the ancient Via Appia road (herein selected as case study). The very subtle and nonpermanent features linked to buried archeological remains can be captured using multitemporal (intra- and inter-year) satellite acquisitions, but this requires strong hardware infrastructures or cloud facilities, today also available as open and free tools as Google Earth Engine (GEE). In this study, a total of 2948 Sentinel 1 and 743 Sentinel 2 images were selected (from February 2017 to August 2020) and processed using GEE to enhance and unveil archeological features. Outputs obtained from both Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 have been successfully compared with in situ analysis and high-resolution Google Earth images.