Statistical Analysis of Multispectral Imaging Data for the Reconstruction of Archaeological Sites
In the XX century, the territory of the absolute majority of archaeological sites in central Russia and the Urals was used as agricultural land. As a result of ploughing, the relief features of the structures were "smoothed out", and the destroyed occupation layer was redistributed throughout the settlement site. Such trends were noted in the study of medieval Finno-Ugric settlements. Areas of the occupation layer of different degrees of preservation are recorded: superficially disrupted, transported, and replaced layer. As a rule, the superficially disrupted and replaced layers are localized at the settlement site. The transported layer moves to the slopes of capes that limit the settlement site. This leads to the need to study the settlement site itself, as well as the adjacent territory. A new algorithm is proposed to restore the structure of the occupation layer of medieval settlements (without relief features). The first stage is the calculation of Haralick’s textural features. The second stage is the reduction of the number of features by the principal component analysis. The third stage is the segmentation of images by the k-means method. This procedure permits to divide the settlement site and adjacent territory into areas with a fundamentally different vegetation density. The comparison with the reference data (geophysical and archaeological studies, survey in the visible range, soil coring, etc.) allows us to interpret the selected areas. The research was carried out at the medieval fortified settlement Sadeykar (Glazovskii district, Udmurtia, Russia). The territory of the settlement has been plowed for a long time and currently the defensive structures (ditch and rampart) are not expressed in relief. As a result of the application of the proposed algorithm of the statistical analysis, the location of the areas of the occupation layer of various degrees of preservation was determined.