Drones over excavations – Enhancing the archaeologist’s eyes. An empirical case study into the deployment of UAS remote sensing as a research tool for archaeological excavation, in Veldhoven, the Netherlands

• Multisensor drone remote sensing over excavations yields valuable information on uncovered archaeological features. • Sedimentological analysis provides insight into both archaeological formation processes and resulting thermal and spectral signatures. • These insights increase the archaeological knowledge of the spectral patterning in the recordings of features that may not have been obvious. In the context of archaeological excavation, drone remote sensing has predominantly been used to collect photographs. This paper demonstrates the potential drone remote sensing beyond visible-light imaging over an excavation of Iron Age and Roman period habitation in Veldhoven, The Netherlands. The result of two recording moments using visible-light, visible-light-near-infrared, and thermal infrared sensors, are archaeologically interpreted, validated, and correlated to the outcomes of a sedimentological analysis of collected sediment samples. This eventually lays bare the interaction between remote sensing visualised data models, expert analysis, reflection attributes of different sediment properties, and archaeological formation processes. The end result is a useful and empirically researched characterization of the causal mechanism that provides a firm base for a model to interpret future drone remote sensing results in excavation contexts.