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| Titel |
Space Archaeology for military-agricultural colonies (tuntian) on the ancient Silk Road, NW China |
| VerfasserIn |
Lei Luo, Xinyuan Wang, Huadong Guo, Chuansheng Liu |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2017
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 19 (2017) |
| Datensatznummer |
250146887
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2017-10951.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| The ancient Silk Road, a pioneering work in the history of human civilization, contributed
greatly to the cultural exchange between China and the West. It is the precious cultural
heritage should be shared by the whole humanity. Although there were countless
archaeological sites along the ancient Silk Road, most of the existing researches just focused
on the sites, lacking the overall understanding of the relationships between sites and their
supporting environment. Space archaeology provides a new viewpoint for investigating,
discovering, reconstructing and documenting the archaeological sites under different scales.
The tuntian system was a state-promoted system of military–agricultural colonies, which
originated in the Western Han dynasty (206 BC–9 AD). All the imperial dynasties in Chinese
history adopted the practice of tuntian to cultivate and guard frontier areas as an important
state policy for developing border areas and consolidating frontier defence. This
study describes the use of Chinese GF-1 imagery, LS-7 ETM+ data and ASTER
GDEMV2 products to uncover an ancient irrigated canal-based tuntian system
located in Milan oasis adjacent to the ancient Kingdom of Loulan at the southern
margin of the Tarim Basin. The GF-1 and LS-7 data were first processed following
atmospheric and geometric correction and enhanced by Gram Schmidt pansharpening.
The linear archaeological traces of tuntian irrigation canals were extracted from
the morphologically enhanced GF-1 PAN imagery using our proposed automatic
method which adopts mathematical morphological processing and Canny edge
operator. Compared with the manual extractions, the overall detection accuracy
was better than 90%. In addition, the functions of the trunk, primary, secondary
and tertiary canals were each analyzed and the spatial extent of Milan’s tuntian
landscape were analyzed with the help of the NDVI derived from the GF-1 multispectral
imagery. The effective irrigated tuntian area was estimated to be 2, 800 ha and the
maximum irrigated tuntian area was found to be more than 8, 000 ha during the area’s
most prosperous period. The overall spatial pattern of Milan’s tuntian landscape
was explored using the patch-corridor-matrix model. The features and functions of
tuntian landscape elements in Mountain-Oasis-Desert Ecosystem (MODES) were
discussed in detail. By detailed analysis of satellite remote sensing data, this study
reconstructed a 3D view of Milan’s tuntian agricultural landscape in a GIS. Milan’s
tuntian system reveals the basic organization pattern of the ancient tuntian system in
Xinjiang, and provides a solid foundation for understanding the military, cultural,
economic and geopolitical values of ancient tuntian system for China frontiers. |
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