Drone mapping unveils 3,000-year-old citadel, reshaping historic historical past

Atmospheric picture of the web site at nightfall, appearing the site on the convergence of 2 gorges. 2023 excavations of inside citadel are visual in foreground. Credit score: Nathaniel Erb-Satullo

A Cranfield College, UK, educational has used drone mapping to research a three,000-year-old ‘mega citadel’ within the Caucasus mountains.

Dr. Nathaniel Erb-Satullo, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Science at Cranfield Forensic Institute, has been researching the web site since 2018 with Dimitri Jachvliani, his co-director from the Georgian Nationwide Museum, revealing main points that re-shape our working out of the web site and give a contribution to a world reassessment of historic agreement expansion and urbanism.
The paintings is printed within the magazine Antiquity.
Citadel settlements within the South Caucasus seemed between 1500–500 BCE, and constitute an unparalleled building within the prehistory of the area. Located on the boundary between Europe, the Eurasian Steppe, and the Heart East, the Caucasus area has an extended historical past as a cultural crossroads with unique native identities.
Analysis at the citadel—named Dmanisis Gora—started with take a look at excavations on a fortified promontory between two deep gorges. A next discuss with in Autumn, when the knee-high summer time grasses had died again, printed that the web site was once a lot higher than at the beginning idea.
Scattered throughout an enormous house outdoor the internal citadel have been the stays of extra fortification partitions and different stone buildings. On account of its dimension, it was once inconceivable to get a way of the web site as a complete from the bottom.
“That was once what sparked the theory of the use of a drone to evaluate the web site from the air,” commented Dr. Erb-Satullo.

“The drone took just about 11,000 photos that have been knitted in combination the use of complicated device to supply high-resolution virtual elevation fashions and orthophotos—composite photos that display each and every level as if you happen to have been having a look directly down.

The group “ground-truthing” imaginable options recognized in aerial pictures. Those pictures additionally display how tricky it’s to get an general sense of the construction web site from the bottom. Credit score: Nathaniel Erb-Satullo

“Those datasets enabled us to spot delicate topographic options and create correct maps of the entire fortification partitions, graves, box techniques, and different stone buildings throughout the outer agreement. The result of this survey confirmed that the web site was once greater than 40 instances higher than at the beginning idea, together with a big outer agreement defended through a 1km-long fortification wall.”
The analysis group used a DJI Phantom 4 RTK drone which may give relative positional accuracy of underneath 2cm in addition to extraordinarily high-resolution aerial imagery. As a way to download a extremely correct map of human-made options, the group moderately checked each and every characteristic within the aerial imagery to verify its identity.
To know how the panorama of the web site had advanced, the orthophotos have been when put next with 50-year-old pictures taken through a Chilly Battle-era secret agent satellite tv for pc declassified in 2013. That gave researchers much-needed perception into which options have been fresh, that have been older.
It additionally enabled researchers to evaluate what spaces of the traditional agreement have been broken through trendy agriculture. All of the ones knowledge units have been merged in Geographic Knowledge Gadget (GIS) device, serving to to spot patterns and adjustments within the panorama.

Buildings within the outer agreement, 1km lengthy fortification wall is visual in higher left. Credit score: Nathaniel Erb-Satullo

1 km lengthy outer fortification wall. Energy/phone line poles for scale. Credit score: Nathaniel Erb-Satullo

“The usage of drones has allowed us to know the importance of the web site and record it in some way that merely would not be imaginable at the floor,” mentioned Dr. Erb-Satullo.

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“Dmanisis Gora is not only a vital to find for the Southern Caucasus area, however has a broader importance for the variety within the construction of large-scale settlements and their formation processes.
“We hypothesize that Dmanisis Gora expanded as a result of its interactions with cellular pastoral teams, and its wide outer agreement will have expanded and reduced in size seasonally. With the web site now broadly mapped, additional find out about will begin to supply insights into spaces corresponding to inhabitants density and depth, cattle actions and agricultural practices, amongst others.”
This knowledge will give researchers new insights into Past due Bronze Age and Early Iron Age societies, and the way those communities functioned.
Because the aerial survey was once finished, Dr. Erb-Satullo has been wearing out additional excavations on the web site, uncovering tens of 1000’s of pottery shards, animal bones, and different artifacts that let us know extra concerning the society that constructed this citadel.

Additional info:
Nathaniel L. Erb-Satullo et al, Mega-fortresses within the South Caucasus: new knowledge from southern Georgia, Antiquity (2025). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.197

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