With around 44,000 students, Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN is known as one of the best schools worldwide for its engineering programs. The school boasts some of the most cutting edge, technologically advanced research centers. Within the Purdue College of Liberal Arts (CLA), one of Purdue’s eight university branches, the institution is well aware that to be able to fully grasp the present and advance into the future, examining the past is vitally important. Being a university with strong technological roots, CLA established the ROSETTA initiative, Remote Sensing Technologies and Techniques in Archaeology, to study our ancient world.

ROSETTA was developed as a way to gather as much information on archeological sites as possible to understand how ancient civilizations lived, and how they can apply to the modern world. Unfortunately, these sites are at the mercy of modern dangers like urban development, climate change, and conflict. Traditional means of manual archeological study needs to be supplemented by technology to preserve the data collection. That is why ROSETTA uses drones and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to discover the mysteries of the past. In the summer of 2019, the ROSETTA program was used to study a small island off the coast of Turkey in which many historical questions had been left unanswered.

Dana island, running along the southern coast of Turkey, is the home of shipyards that were believed to date back as far as 1200 BC. It was inhabited by both the Roman and early Byzantine Empires from 250-800 AD. Ruins of churches, homes, aqueducts, and harbor settlements have been found, but archeologists believe that Dana island supported the largest shipyard of the ancient world, marking it an important point of study for the Bogsak Archaeological Survey Project (BOGA) that focuses on the historical impact of maritime landscapes in the Mediterranean. Assisted by Professors Ayman Habib and Evan Flatt from Purdue, the BOGA project had the opportunity to enhance their research with the help of drones.

ROSETTA has an impressive collection of drone equipment at its disposal for such surveys. The primary drone they use is the DJI Matrice 600, a drone specifically designed for professional and industrial aerial photography. According to ROSETTA’s website, the drone’s payload consists of “an Applanix APX-15v3 Global Navigation Satellite System and Inertial Navigation System (GNSS/INS). The remote sensing capabilities are based on a Velopdyne VLP 32C LiDAR sensor, and a 42 megapixel Sony α7R III RGB camera. The VLP 32C LiDAR sensor is capable of generating 600k – 1.2 million data points per second with a measurement range of up to 200m. The data processing will provide positional accuracy to 5-7cm while flying at an altitude of 50m.” The team flew the drone over known archeological sites to develop the highest quality 3D maps to compare to existing data.

By comparing the maps created by the drones with found artifacts, the archeologists were able to see that some of the ruins actually pre-date what had already been discovered. The drones were able to locate ceramic distributions that showed a different geospatial density. This information shows that some of the ruins in fact date back to the Iron Age. Thanks to the new insights provided by drone technology, the BOGA project will continue researching the ancient ruins for more clues into the past. As Professor Habib said, “We proved the high potential for our technology to be used for data collection for archaeological documentation. We have opened the door to new and different methods and research problems in accurate mapping of real-world objects and locations.” Though the civilizations that once inhabited Dana island may have never imagined a world like ours, technology like drones can give a better understanding of how civilizations once survived.

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