Through development of various sorts, humans constantly erase the traces of earlier habitation in a given place. This process often deprives us of valuable information about our early ancestors and antecedents unless archaeologists are able to make a record of relevant remains before they are destroyed. Once the early remains are gone, so too is the information they might have yielded forever lost to us. In some cases, however, archaeologists have been able to retrieve much information that had been considered lost by using aerial or satellite imagery taken of a site before development had destroyed it. In this way, information about above-ground remains (and, in some cases, buried remains) has been recovered through photographic evidence. When the imagery permits photogrammetric analysis, high-precision measurements have been made of such remains. When integrated with a GIS environment, these recovered remains can often be mapped and combined with other archaeological and related data to reconstruct the broader context within which the lost remains were embedded.

Although the methods here described have been successfully developed and exploited by archaeologists in various parts of the world, Europe in particular, to date very little progress has been made with respect to their application in Northeast Asia. This program seeks to remedy this shortcoming by focusing resources on the identification of historical imagery produced by aerial or satellite platforms, the creation of finding aids and catalogues for this imagery, the development of a set of tools to exploit the imagery for archaeological purposes, and the drafting of a set of best practices to guide researchers in the effective use of the imagery and the associated toolkit.