For the last seven years, PlanetScope satellites have started near-daily imaging of parts of the Earth’s surface, making high-density multitemporal, multispectral, 3-m pixel imagery accessible to researchers. Multitemporal satellite data enables landscape archaeologists to examine changes in environmental conditions at time scales ranging from daily to decadal. This kind of temporal resolution can accentuate landscape features on the ground by de-emphasizing non-permanent signatures caused by seasonal or even daily changes in vegetation. We argue that the availability of high spatial and temporal resolution multispectral imagery from Planet Inc. will enable new approaches to studying archaeological visibility in landscapes. While palimpsests are discrete overlapping layers of material accumulation, multitemporal composites capture cyclical and seasonal time and can be used to interpret past landscape histories at multiple scales. To illustrate this perspective, we present three case studies using PlanetScope imagery in tropical environments on the Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar, Mauritius, and Zanzibar.

在过去七年中，PlanetScope 卫星几乎每天都对地球表面的部分区域进行成像，使研究人员可以获得高密度多时相、多光谱、3 米像素图像。多时相卫星数据使景观考古学家能够在每天到十年的时间尺度上检查环境条件的变化。这种时间分辨率可以通过淡化由季节甚至每日植被变化引起的非永久性特征来强调地面景观特征。我们认为，Planet Inc. 提供的高空间和时间分辨率多光谱图像将为研究景观中的考古可见性提供新方法。虽然重写是材料积累的离散重叠层，但多时相复合材料捕获了周期性和季节性时间，并且可用于在多个尺度上解释过去的景观历史。为了说明这一观点，我们使用 PlanetScope 图像在印度洋岛屿马达加斯加、毛里求斯和桑给巴尔的热带环境中进行了三个案例研究。