Searching for Viking Age Fortresses with Automatic Landscape Classification and Feature Detection

Across the world, cultural heritage is eradicated at an unprecedented rate by development, agriculture, and natural erosion. Remote sensing using airborne and satellite sensors is an essential tool for rapidly investigating human traces over large surfaces of our planet, but even large monumental structures may be visible as only faint indications on the surface. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of a machine learning approach using airborne laser scanning data to address a “needle-in-a-haystack” problem, which involves the search for remnants of Viking ring fortresses throughout Denmark. First ring detection was applied using the Hough circle transformations and template matching, which detected 202,048 circular features in Denmark. This was reduced to 199 candidate sites by using their geometric properties and the application of machine learning techniques to classify the cultural and topographic context of the features. Two of these near perfectly circular features are convincing candidates for Viking Age fortresses, and two are candidates for either glacial landscape features or simple meteor craters. Ground-truthing revealed the latter sites as ice age features, while the cultural heritage sites Borgø and Trælbanke urge renewed archaeological investigation in the light of our findings. The fact that machine learning identifies compelling new candidate sites for ring fortresses demonstrates the power of the approach. Our automatic approach is applicable worldwide where digital terrain models are available to search for cultural heritage sites, geomorphological features, and meteor impact craters.