Satellite-Based Detection of Looted Archaeological Sites Using Machine Learning

Looting at archaeological sites poses a severe risk to cultural heritage, yet monitoring thousands of remote locations remains operationally difficult. We present a scalable and satellite-based pipeline to detect looted archaeological sites, using PlanetScope monthly mosaics (4.7m/pixel) and a curated dataset of 1,943 archaeological sites in Afghanistan (898 looted, 1,045 preserved) with multi-year imagery (2016--2023) and site-footprint masks. We compare (i) end-to-end CNN classifiers trained on raw RGB patches and (ii) traditional machine learning (ML) trained on handcrafted spectral/texture features and embeddings from recent remote-sensing foundation models. Results indicate that ImageNet-pretrained CNNs combined with spatial masking reach an F1 score of 0.926, clearly surpassing the strongest traditional ML setup, which attains an F1 score of 0.710 using SatCLIP-V+RF+Mean, i.e., location and vision embeddings fed into a Random Forest with mean-based temporal aggregation. Ablation studies demonstrate that ImageNet pretraining (even in the presence of domain shift) and spatial masking enhance performance. In contrast, geospatial foundation model embeddings perform competitively with handcrafted features, suggesting that looting signatures are extremely localized. The repository is available at https://github.com/microsoft/looted_site_detection.