Historical ruins of remote sensing archaeology in arid desertified environment, northwestern China

Abstract

Silk Road is an important exchange channel for human communication and culture propagation between ancient China and the West during historical periods. A lot of human activities performed in Silk Road and many historical ruins leave behind to present. Archaeological ruins can play a significant role in studying and restoring the past human activities, as well as understanding regional environmental changes. There were many flourishingly human activities during different historical periods that were developed in ancient Juyan Oasis in the downstream of the Heihe River Basin. A large number of historical ruins that reflect past human activities preserved between numerous of the nebkhas and sand dunes. In this study, combined high-resolution remote sensing imageries with in situ truths investigated during the fieldwork, certain unknown ruins were identified according to the image features of historical ruins that appear in remotely sensed data, which were undiscovered during the previous field archaeological investigations and unreported in the past public literatures. Almost all of the newly discovered ruins that were identified using remote sensing images are distributed in the Lvcheng and BJ2008 surroundings. Newly findings supplement the missing gaps that were not taking into account during the previous field surveys.