Tell Asmar Footprint Watch

Concept

One capability: footprint-anchored change detection. The product georeferences the published outlines of the Gimilsin Temple and the Palace of the Rulers [0] — plus, new in this iteration, the private-house blocks and associated grave areas published in the Diyala houses-and-graves volume [1] — onto current high-resolution satellite imagery of the Tell Asmar mound, then runs periodic image comparisons that flag new disturbance inside and immediately around those documented zones. The output is a ranked alert list (e.g., 'new pit cluster ~40 m from the palace's west wall, inside the documented grave area of the northern residential block'), not a dashboard suite. The anchor remains the point: regional looting surveys of Iraqi tells exist, but tying alerts to the exact documented extent of named buildings, house blocks and burial grounds tells the site manager not just that the mound changed, but which published structures and grave groups are specifically at risk.

What the new evidence adds

• From two buildings to the whole published site. The houses-and-graves volume [1] (a print-only 30 cm folio with fold-out maps and grave plans) documents residential blocks and grave areas across the Diyala sites, including Tell Asmar's quarters. This extends the anchor set from two public monuments to the looting-prone residential and burial zones, and gives alert ranking a principled signal: documented grave density. Burial areas are where looters expect grave goods, so new disturbance there should outrank disturbance in empty ground.
• Grave plans turn noise into a mask. A prior open question feared that dense graves and old excavation trenches would generate false positives. The published grave plans largely answer it: 1930s–40s excavation scars can be digitized as a known-disturbance mask and subtracted from the baseline, so comparisons flag only new disturbance. What looked like a noise problem becomes both a filter and a prioritization signal.
• Reliable multi-date comparison. Scattergram-controlled relative radiometric normalization [2] — developed for the 21-year Landsat MSS archive (1972–1992) — is an established method for making imagery from different dates, seasons and sensors comparable before change detection. Applying the same normalization to the watch's high-resolution image pairs suppresses false alarms from purely radiometric differences. The MSS archive itself also supplies a pre-looting baseline: 1972–1992 imagery predates the major Iraqi looting waves of the 1990s–2000s.

Bounds and open questions

• Resolution bound. MSS pixels (~60–80 m) cannot resolve individual looting pits. The MSS baseline is therefore bounded to mound- and zone-scale context — encroaching construction, land-use conversion, large earthmoving — while pit-level alerts still depend on current sub-meter imagery. This partially answers the minimum-resolution question: coarse archives set context; high-resolution imagery does detection.
• The digitization burden grows. Two building outlines were a bounded one-time task; fold-out maps and grave plans across residential blocks are a larger one, though still finite. Georeferencing accuracy of 1940s-era print plans to modern WGS84 remains unvalidated in the field and should be checked against visible mound features before alerts carry distance claims.
• The roadmap risk sharpens. A grave-density map is exactly the target list looters would want. The density layer and digitized grave plans must sit in an access-controlled layer shared only with heritage authorities; what circulates is the alert list, not the underlying maps.
• Response capacity. Whether the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage can act on prioritized alerts in remote areas remains open; the product ranks alerts, it cannot assume enforcement.
• Scope discipline. The named scope stays Tell Asmar. The volume covers the wider Diyala region, so the same footprint-anchored method could later be replicated at neighboring Diyala sites — a follow-on, not this product. The tool also remains a monitoring-and-alert service, not a 3D reconstruction, a development-screening registry, or an object-provenance lookup.