[ProtectOurFreedom]

Amazing.

Also amazing that archeologists spend time poring over Google Earth images looking for things like this. How tedious. I wonder if AI has been applied to this.

“...it’s likely that the inhabitants were ‘familiar with warfare’”

Was there anybody NOT familiar with warfare in those ancient times? Or throughout all history, for that matter? Could anybody be born, live and die without having their village raided, marauded and plundered?

[SunkenCiv]

Yeah, that gave me a good laugh.

• Fortifications on Gournia Debunk Myth of Peaceful Minoan Society [05/04/2010]

[verum ago]

Also amazing that archeologists spend time poring over Google Earth images looking for things like this. How tedious. I wonder if AI has been applied to this.

There are efforts in that direction, not necessarily “AI” per se but image recognition algorithms. There’s also some websites that post imagery and let public review it and tag locations of interest for review.

One of the major issues at this point is that a lot of sites require elevation/contrast-enhancement to be recognizable, but the enhancement tends to introduce image artifacts with a lot of straight lines and sharp corners. Both the volunteers and computerized recognition programs then flag the artifacts as looking manmade.

It’s still quite promising though. The current issues are not fatal to the technique, they just need some improvement (and such enhancement techniques are very rapidly improving all the time). One of the biggest improvements will be to throw drone imagery into the mix- the higher resolution (vs satellite) and more easily orthorectified drone imagery will need less enhancement, and therefore suffer less issues related to enhancement.