A quick reference. Each row is a sensing modality, what it's good for, and a representative application.
| Method | What it sees | Notable applications |
|---|---|---|
| Aerial photography | Crop marks, soil marks, shadows from low-relief earthworks | British Iron Age forts (O.G.S. Crawford, 1920s onward); Roman roads |
| Multispectral satellite imagery | Vegetation stress over buried walls; soil-chemistry differences | Sarah Parcak's Egyptian pyramid identifications |
| Hyperspectral imagery | Mineralogy and vegetation health at finer spectral resolution | Mining-impact archaeology; ancient agricultural systems |
| Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) | Subsurface features in arid soil; structures under sand | Saharan and Arabian buried watercourses; SIR-A/B/C shuttle data |
| Airborne LiDAR | Earthworks under forest canopy, microtopography to ~10 cm | Maya cities (Caracol, Tikal, Mirador basin); Angkor's urban extent; the Stonehenge landscape |
| Ground-penetrating radar | Features in the upper few metres of soil at site scale | Stonehenge subsurface mapping; Pompeii sub-floor work |
| Magnetometry, resistivity, induction | Iron, fired clay, ditches, walls at site scale | Standard modern excavation prep |
| Thermal infrared | Day/night temperature differentials revealing subsurface mass | Buried walls; underground voids |