Mr. Xiping Hui, a graduate student at Shandong University, China, and currently a VAR student here at Yale (until September 2010), and I are working on this project together. We have a lot of settlement data from the prehistoric and early Bronze Age that our Chinese-American team collected during several years of survey in southeastern Shandong province. Now we want to understand the relationship of settlements in specific time periods to different features of the environment such as type of water source, quality of agricultural land, etc. I would like to better understand what we can learn from satellite imagery in this regard, as well as GIS. Xiping will have time to focus on these issues during the next few months. I do not have much time at the moment given that I just moved here and began teaching right away. But I will do what I can and am grateful for this tremendous resource at Yale.
During the past year I bought some satellite images of our general research area from the USGS, and I need to learn what they can tell me and what else I should be doing.