Beyond site-specific archaeological prospection: Spectral-geometry reveals cross-site cropmark signals in satellite data

Abstract

Abstract Remote sensing has long supported archaeological prospection, mainly through the detection of cropmarks, a key archaeological proxy expressed as spectral vegetation anomalies over subsurface features. Yet, cropmark detection is still assumed in the literature to be highly site-specific, governed by local agronomic and environmental conditions. Using multispectral Sentinel-2 data from three European archaeological sites, we show that models trained in one landscape can recover meaningful archaeological proxy signals in other locations. By relying strictly on satellite spectral signatures for training, our models achieve measurable cross-location transferability without incorporating ancillary environmental data. We find that cross-site performance arises not from geographic proximity but from the spectral-geometric similarity of vegetation responses, and that transferability is strongly directional. We quantify this relationship through a Directional Strength Score (DSS), derived from monthly subcluster distances under multiple norms, which captures directional geometric similarity and correlates strongly with machine-learning performance. To keep the analysis grounded in the underlying spectral signal, we relied on architecturally restrained nonlinear classifiers (SVM and constrained XGBoost) and used NDVI-identified phenophases to align training and evaluation with comparable seasonal windows. Taken together, these results demonstrate that partial, spectrally mediated cross-location cropmark detection is feasible and that the underlying vegetation responses exhibit stable spectral structure, with spectral geometry offering a clear interpretive lens on why these signals can transfer across sites. Leveraging globally harmonized satellite data, this approach offers a scalable complement to uneven historical aerial archives and supports systematic regional archaeological prioritization to be deployed within integrated archaeological workflows.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. PNAS Nexus, 2026 · DOI ↗