Over the last twenty years archaeologists have begun to utilize satellite remote sensing capabilities for identifying and mapping archaeological sites from space; few however have explored the possibilities of using this technology to monitor change in archaeological sites over time. Here very high resolution (CORONA; Google Earth) and medium resolution (ASTER) satellite imagery is used to attempt to detect change over time at eight Neolithic sites on the Chengdu Plain in Sichuan, China.
In the first case CORONA images from 1971 are compared with modern Google Earth images to determine if above ground site features have degraded over time. In the second section ASTER imagery from 2001 and 2011 is classified and compared to determine changes in land use patterns around sites. Conclusions are then drawn about both the usefulness of these methods for archaeology and about the state of preservation of archaeological sites on the Chengdu Plain.