Google Earth and GIS applications to the third national survey of cultural relics in Xinjiang

Now Geographical Information System (GIS) and Google Earth (GE) have become increasingly popular within archaeological research contexts. GIS allows to contain and to store, manage and represent the archaeological data, following the different phases of archaeological research. GE uses high resolution satellite images of the entire planet to allow the archaeologists to find archaeological marks and view the sites from different perspectives. This paper demonstrate our work that integrate use of GE and GIS for the third national survey of cultural relics in Xinjiang, showing that the method proposed is effective and practical.