The discipline lives in a small set of academic departments, federal-adjacent institutions, and professional societies.
Academic hubs — US
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Sarah Parcak's lab; satellite archaeology; GlobalXplorer.
Dartmouth
Jesse Casana; the CORONA Atlas project for Mesopotamian and Levantine sites.
University of Texas at Austin
Geography Department; the Beach Lab runs multi-year NSF-funded LiDAR projects in Belize and Guatemala.
University of Colorado Boulder
Payson Sheets; radar imaging at Cerén.
Boston University
William Saturno; Maya remote sensing.
UC Santa Barbara
Anabel Ford; El Pilar project.
Texas A&M
Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation (founded by George Bass): sonar, magnetometry, sub-bottom profiling for shipwrecks. Different methods, same intellectual family.
Academic hubs — international
École française d'Extrême-Orient
Damian Evans; LiDAR mapping of Angkor and Cambodian urban complexes.
University of Cambridge
Long tradition of aerial archaeology and landscape sensing in Britain.
University of Oxford
School of Archaeology; companion British tradition.
Federal and IC-adjacent
NASA
Earth observation programs (Marshall, Goddard) that have occasionally funded or partnered on archaeological remote sensing.
NGA
Unclassified heritage damage assessments; acknowledged academic collaborations.
Smithsonian
Cultural Property Protection community; imagery analysis with archaeological applications.
USGIF
United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. Annual GEOINT Symposium with archaeology tracks.
Professional societies and conferences
Society for American Archaeology
Annual meeting; remote-sensing committee and dedicated sessions.
Computer Applications in Archaeology
CAA International conference; remote sensing is a major track.
American Geophysical Union
Fall Meeting includes geophysics methods that overlap heavily with archaeological remote sensing.
GEOINT Symposium
Run by USGIF; the IC side of the field.
Regional notes — Texas and Houston
Houston is not itself a hub for archaeological remote sensing, but Texas has stronger options than the casual reader might expect, and Houston's adjacent industries are first cousins to the discipline.
UT Austin
About 2.5 hours by road. Geography Department; Beach Lab. Open seminars and graduate students who are the natural population to talk to.
Texas A&M
About 1.5 hours. Maritime archaeology centre; the Anthropology department also has terrestrial archaeologists.
UT San Antonio
Center for Archaeological Research; LiDAR and aerial work in Texas borderlands.
Texas State, San Marcos
Center for Archaeological Studies; active fieldwork.
Rice & University of Houston
Adjacent geophysics through the oil-and-gas industry — Schlumberger/SLB, Halliburton, TGS, CGG. Seismic imaging, electromagnetic surveys, hyperspectral mineralogy, synthetic-aperture techniques. The methods are first cousins; SEG and AAPG conferences hold sessions where techniques cross over.
Texas Archeological Society
Statewide. Annual and quarterly meetings open to amateurs and professionals together. Houston Archaeological Society is the local chapter; monthly meetings; a low-friction entry point.