On the Discovery of a Roman Fortified Site in Gafsa, Southern Tunisia, Based on High-Resolution X-Band Satellite Radar Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

  the paper is very interesting but it needs some revision before the publication.

First of all you should better highlight the value of this approach in comparison with two other articles you have published since they deal with the same geographical area (1. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/2/567/htm; 2. https://www.academia.edu/42579088/Remote_sensing_and_GIS_techniques_for_reconstructing_the_military_fort_system_on_the_Roman_boundary_Tunisian_section_and_identifying_archaeological_sites).

Then, you should review the methodological part, especially pages 8 and 9, where there are many sentences taken from this article: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00844118v3/document. I understand it is about methodology but it would be good to reword some passages.

Finally, a moderate English mother-tongue review should be necessary starting with the title.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your time and efforts in evaluating our manuscript. We appreciate your valuable suggestions and comments very much. They are very helpful for improving our manuscript.

We have carefully revised this manuscript according to your comments. In the following, we are going to explain how your comments have been taken into account in the revised manuscript. Moreover, to get good quality, we further review the whole manuscript. The revisions made to the manuscript are marked in red.

Hope this version can be accepted for publication.

Thank you!

 

Sincerely,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for the interesting paper. I think it could be a valuable contribution to archaeological SAR analysis. However, the paper reads like it is very hastily written (making it hard to read) and contains quite a few (editing) typos. At some parts, I am missing references. I think the paper could be improved by adding some diagrams to visually explain the method (especially the part with the equations is very hard to follow). I also feel like a discussion of the results is missing. I have added comments in the text.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your time and efforts in evaluating our manuscript. We appreciate your valuable suggestions and comments very much. They are very helpful for improving our manuscript.

We have carefully revised this manuscript according to your comments. In the following, we are going to explain how your comments have been taken into account in the revised manuscript. Moreover, to get good quality, we further review the whole manuscript. The revisions made to the manuscript are marked in red.

Hope this version can be accepted for publication.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Your paper describes an interesting approach in applying high-resolution SAR-data to archaeological sites. Such remote sensing survey approaches are quite important especially in regions that are not accessible for ground-based surveys now.

However, several improvements have to be made to make the paper more readable and valuable for the scientific community:

1. Please check the formatting of your text, as there are several mistakes. E.g.:
   • Check the affiliations, where addresses are wrong.
   • Re-read you text to eliminate small typing errors, e.g. l. 69, l. 73/74 (reference is doubled), l. 178, l. 195, l. 304, l. 320, l. 321 etc.
   • Do not split Table 1 into two pages.
   • Try to avoid a caption at the bottom of a page and the corresponding text at the next one (e.g. l. 199 or l. 314)
   • Formatting of the References section is needed, e.g. letter size, Reference [8] is incomplete etc.
2. In chapter 2.2., you mention at the end: “Comprehensive series of works and monographs and an immense 142 number of other contributions and papers have been published.” Please cite at least some of them!
3. Your Formulas 3 & 4 have to be proved by references.
4. In Fig. 5 & 6, you have to discriminate between the two sites. This does not get clear at the first glance.
5. Fig. 8 seems to show site 1 and not site 2, as you name in the caption.

You have to exchange your Fig. 1 or cite it correctly! It is not from [34], but simply copied from the internet (https://www.unavco.org/instrumentation/geophysical/imaging/sar-satellites/lib/images/sar_satellite_missions.png). If you do not give the written permission of the image copyright holder, this is plagiarism!

Compared with the theory at the beginning, the description of the results (in my opinion the most important part of the paper!) is too short. The results section must be much more in detail and the detected archaeological remains have to be described detailed. In addition, figure out, why CSK and TSX-SL do not really work well, as the layout of the fortresses is visible there also quite well. At least, it looks like this with the red rectangles showing the position. If not detectable, remove the rectangles and use only arrows to show the position.

Furthermore, a comparison with a high-resolution DEM or at least an optical satellite image must be provided for both sites to show which part of the backscatter is from subsurface features and which part from the micro-topography of the archaeological remains.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your time and efforts in evaluating our manuscript. We appreciate your valuable suggestions and comments very much. They are very helpful for improving our manuscript.

We have carefully revised this manuscript according to your comments. In the following, we are going to explain how your comments have been taken into account in the revised manuscript. Moreover, to get good quality, we further review the whole manuscript. The revisions made to the manuscript are marked in red.

Hope this version can be accepted for publication.

Thank you!

 

Sincerely,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The article has greatly improved over the last version. I do still have comments (see the attached file) generally concerning figures and the discussion. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “On the discovery of a Roman fortified site in Gafsa, southern Tunisia, based on high-resolution X-band satellite radar data” (ID: remotesensing-1658006). Your comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our research. We have studied the comments carefully and have made corrections which we hope meet with approval. Revised portions are marked with different colors in the paper. The following are the replies to all the comments term by term. For convenience in review, the comments by the reviewers are written in black-colored text, the replies are in red-colored text, and the presentations that appeared in the revised version by red-colored text.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Your revised manuscript is much more improved now. There are only some minor issues that should/could be still improved:

1. There are still some small mistakes in the affiliations, e.g. email-addresses of Masini & Lasaponara.
2. There is a strange page break from p. 3 to 4. I do not know whether you can change this or whether this has to be done in the final proof of the publisher.
3. In the results section, I would appreciate a detailed analysis also of the detected archaeological features, i.e. the size of the fortress, a description, whether only the larger defensive structures or also parts of the internal layout incl. the size of the latter features known from ground-truthing. This would give the reader an impression of how small archaeological features may be to be detected by the VHR SAR data.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “On the discovery of a Roman fortified site in Gafsa, southern Tunisia,based on high-resolution X-band satellite radar data” (ID: remotesensing-1658006). Your comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our research. We have studied the comments carefully and have made corrections which we hope meet with approval. Revised portions are marked with different colors in the paper. The following are the replies to all the comments term by term. For convenience in review, the comments by the reviewers are written in black-colored text, the replies are in red-colored text, the presentations that appeared in the revised version by red-colored text.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf