Mitigating the impacts of environmental change on cultural heritage using drone-based survey techniques

随着气候变化影响的加剧，沿海地区的考古遗址日益受到沿海或河流侵蚀、永久冻土融化或海平面上升的威胁(Masselink和Russell 2013)。部分由于缺乏资源和一些地点偏远，许多遗址没有得到研究，尽管很容易遭到破坏，但缺乏适当的环境管理战略，往往导致对人类历史知识的重大丧失。例如，最近的SCHARP项目(www.scharp.co.uk)调查了苏格兰海岸约35%的地区，评估了12000个有记录的古迹(另见Rennie等人2017年)。结果表明，这些遗址中有4000个需要某种形式的考古干预，即使是被标记为优先考古的C.100个遗址，其数量也远远超过任何国家或商业机构的物质和经济能力。在许多情况下，除非重大基础设施受到威胁，否则国家对海岸管理采取最低限度的方法，允许海岸线随着时间的推移自然演变，这主要是由于工程解决方案的费用及其可能产生的不利生态影响。然而，与某些环境或生态系统可以自然迁移或通过人为干预不同，考古古迹不能在其他地方重新创建-它们是一种日益减少的资源。许多受威胁的沿海地点没有得到详细的记录，要么是通过传统的地面方法，要么是通过现代技术，如机载激光雷达。这两种方法都可能既昂贵又耗时，而且需要熟练的人员来承担和/或处理收集的数据。最近无人机技术的应用正在迅速给包括考古学在内的许多行业带来革命性的变化。特别是，无人机衍生的摄影测量已成为记录文化遗产的一项重要且具有成本效益的技术(例如，O‘Driscoll 2018)。然而，它在更广泛的景观研究中的有效性尚未完全实现，尽管这项技术允许用户进行大规模地形测量并创建密集的三维模型，成本只有LiDAR的一小部分，而且空间分辨率要高得多。高分辨率地形测量可大大有助于记录现存的考古遗址以及确定以前未见过的地表特征。虽然这种技术在遗产管理能力方面有明显的应用，但其他基于无人机的新颖技术可以增加更多价值。热成像、多光谱成像和高光谱成像探测地下考古的潜力是众所周知的。直到最近，这些技术还仅限于低分辨率卫星和轻型飞机衍生的调查，这些调查费用高昂，而且往往是在不利于考古的条件下进行的。然而，随着现代无人机的出现和硬件的重大发展，这些技术越来越适用于考古学家，尽管很少有公开发表的使用实例。在这方面，该项目将评估开发无人机技术和其他相对低成本的遥感技术，以快速记录和发现受到海岸侵蚀威胁的考古遗址的能力。候选人将接受各种跨学科和新的调查方法的使用和适用性方面的培训，该项目的结果有可能被用于政策制定和遗产管理，同时也被用作政府机构的资源分配工具。

With the increasing effects of climate change, archaeological sites in coastal regions are increasingly under threat by coastal or fluvial erosion, melting permafrost or rising sea levels (Masselink and Russell 2013). Due in part to a lack of resources and remoteness of some locations, many sites are unstudied and lack adequate environmental management strategies despite being vulnerable to destruction, often resulting in a significant loss of knowledge of human history. The recent SCHARP project (www.scharp.co.uk), for example, surveyed approximately 35% of the Scottish Coast, assessing 12000 recorded monuments (See also Rennie et al 2017). The results indicated that 4000 of these sites needed some form of archaeological intervention, with even the c.100 sites marked as a priority proving a number far exceeding the physical and economic capacity of any state or commercial body. In many instances, unless major infrastructure is threatened, the state takes a minimal approach to coastal management, allowing the coastline to evolve naturally over time, primarily due to the expense of engineering solutions and the adverse ecological effects they can have. However, unlike certain environments or ecosystems that can migrate naturally or by engineered intervention, archaeological monuments cannot be re-created elsewhere - they are a diminishing resource. Many threatened coastal sites have not been subject to detailed recording, either by conventional ground-based methods or modern techniques such as airborne LiDAR. Both methods can be costly and time consuming, and require skilled individuals to undertake and/or process the collected data. The recent application of drone technology is quickly revolutionising many sectors, including archaeology. Drone derived photogrammetry, in particular, has become an important and cost effective technique for recording cultural heritage (e.g. O'Driscoll 2018). Its effectiveness in wider landscape studies, however, has not yet been fully realised, despite the technique allowing users to undertake large-scale topographical survey and create dense three-dimensional models at a fraction of the cost of LiDAR, and at a much higher spatial resolution. High-resolution topographical surveys can contribute greatly to the recording of extant archaeological sites as well as the identification of previously unseen surface features. While there are clear applications for such technology in a heritage management capacity, other novel drone-based techniques can add further value. The potential for thermal, multi- and hyper-spectral imaging to detect subsurface archaeology is well known. Until recently these techniques were confined to low-resolution satellite and light-aircraft derived surveys which are costly and are often undertaken in conditions unfavourable for archaeology. However, with the advent of modern drones and a significant evolution in hardware, these techniques have become more applicable to archaeologists, though there are little published examples of their use.In this regard, the project will assess the ability of developing drone technology and other relatively low-cost remote sensing techniques to rapidly record and discover archaeological sites threatened by coastal erosion. The candidate will be trained in the use and applicability of a variety of interdisciplinary and novel methods of survey, with the results of the project having the potential to feed into policy making and heritage management, while also being used as a resource allocation tool for government agencies.