This project will increase the knowledge about, and build transferable expertise in, the remote sensing (RS) of archaeological residues (AR). Current archaeological RS techniques have evolved with variable understanding of the physical, chemical, biological and environmental processes involved. Thus current detection strategies do not allow systematic AR assessment leading to sub-optimal heritage management and development control. This project will focus on analysing the physical and environmental factors that influence AR contrast dynamics with the overall aim of improving site and feature detection.\n\nArchaeological RS techniques rely on the ability of a sensor to detect the contrast between an AR and its immediate surroundings or matrix. AR detection is influenced by many factors - changes in precipitation, temperature, crop stress/type, soil type and structure and land management techniques. These factors vary seasonally and diurnally, meaning that the ability to detect an AR with a specific sensor changes over time.\n\nWithout understanding the processes that affect the visibility and detection of ARs (directly and by proxy), prospection techniques will remain somewhat ad-hoc and opportunistic. Enhanced knowledge of ARs is important in the long-term curation of a diminishing heritage and will provide cost savings to operational works (through more effective mitigation). This is important in environments where traditional optical aerial photography has been unresponsive (e.g pasture and clay soils).\n\nThe project is timely considering the recent development of high spatial and spectral resolution ground, air and satellite sensors.\nThe project involves 4 stages:\n1 Identifying appropriate candidate sites and sampling methodology\n2 Field measurements and collecting and analysing field samples from sites under different conditions\n3 Physical modelling, feedback, knowledge articulation\n4 Evaluation\nSites will be chosen on the basis of contrasting ARs, soil and land management conditions etc. Close liaison with curatorial agencies (with excavation data) is necessary to ensure a representative range of AR types is identified. It will be important to include sites with varying environmental conditions and AR types (buried soils, 'negative' features such as ditches, buried masonry and surface materials).\n\nTo determine contrast factors strategic samples and measurements will be taken on and around the AR at different times of the day and year to ensure that a representative range of conditions is covered. Field measurements will include geophysical and hyperspectral surveys, thermal profiling, soil moisture and spectral reflectance. Laboratory analysis of samples will include geochemistry and particle size.\n\nModels will be developed that translate these physical values into spectral, magnetic, electrical and acoustic measures in order to determine contrast parameters. Data fusion and knowledge reasoning techniques will be used to develop management tools to improve the programming of surveys. These tools will be used to deploy sensors, including aerial hyperspectral devices, for evaluation purposes.\n\nIn summary, this project will impact on and develop:\n1 Baseline understanding and knowledge about AR contrast processes and preservation dynamics:\n a. leading to better management and curation\n b. providing data to model environmental impact on ARs\n c. enhancing the understanding of the resource base\n2 The identification of suitable sensors and conditions for their use (and feedback to improve sensor design)\n3 Data fusion techniques (physical models, multi-sensor data and domain knowledge) to improve AR identification\n4 An Interdisciplinary network between remote sensing, soil science, computing and heritage professionals\n5 Techniques for researchers to access data archives more effectively\n\nWe believe that the results will have national impact and have the potential for transfer throughout the world.

This project will build on the work undertaken from 2013 to 2017 on the European Travellers to Wales 1750-2010 project, a collaboration between researchers in Modern Langages based at Bangor University, Swansea University and the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and their partners at the National Library of Wales and the within the museum sector in Wales. Broadly speaking, the original project set out to explore the responses in travel writing of European travellers coming to Wales over a period of nearly three centuries. The research uncovered travellers' responses to Wales as a peripheral, at times unexpected nation with a culture often little known in the European context. Underpinning the project was the creation of a searchable open access database of accounts of travel (etw.bangor.ac.uk/accounts-of-travel) which now contains over 400 entries. This follow-on project aims to exploit the material held in this database by working with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Mouments of Wales and Visit Wales to help to promote Wales, its history, cultural heritage and landscape more widely to national and international audiences by developing an interactive mobile-friendly website that allows users (primarily but not exclusively from German and French-speaking Europe) to create themed travel routes through Wales and to access historical, site-specific material that interprets individual locations from the perspective of travellers through time (in particular the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). The interactive website will make this newly recovered historical material available to new, general audiences in a way which will have a positive impact on the tourist activity in Wales, in so doing contributing to one of the most important elements of the Welsh economy and targeting one of the key markets identified by Visit Wales. The development of this new website will exploit the unexpected quality and quantity of previously unknown or forgotten material dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which has been uncovered during the main research undertaken for the European Travellers to Wales project and which is now surfaced in the database. The material in question covers a period of great change in the landscape, culture and heritage of Wales and modern-day visitors will be able to 'experience' those changes through the eyes of their travelling predecessors, thus opening up a unique view of Wales to a new generation of travellers from Europe, but also casting a new light on the perception of Wales over time for visitors from the United Kingdom and other parts of the world. This will be made possible through the collation of exisiting digital materials and the development, using the expertise of the Royal Commission team, of new digital resources consisting of historical visual material, digital visualisation and reconstructions, panotours of gigapixel photography and Virtual Reality experiences. Downloadable materials will also be made available. The website will be hosted by Bangor University and promoted globally via the various platforms operated by Visit Wales.

This project aims to develop an intelligent platform for taking aerial digital photographs using a kite to lift the platform. Thisintelligent kite aerial photography platform (iKAPP) will use an onboard computer and two cameras with different resolutions (levels of detail). The platform will hang from the kite line below the kite and will have a stabilization system to control the direction that thehigher resolution camera points in. This stabilization will be controlled both by lightweight solid-state gyroscopes and by using the views of the two cameras to decide how the platform is moving, and how to compensate for the movement. This is difficult because the platform must be light enough to be lifted by the kite as well as have a fast enough computer to be able to process the images faster than the platform moves.The completes iKAPP and its software will be test flown beneath a kite and when it works properly it will be used to survey an archaeological site (probably an iron age hillfort). The images that the iKAPP captures will then be compared with images obtained using normal aerial photography techniques (using an aeroplane).If the iKAPP works properly it will be useful for lots of different surveying tasks including environmental surveys, archaeological surveys, crop monitoring and other recconaissance activities.