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The increasing relevance of remote sensing and artificial intelligence (AI) for archaeological research and cultural heritage management is undeniable. However, there is a critical gap in this field. Many studies conclude with identifying hundreds or even thousands of potential sites, but very few follow through with crucial fieldwork validation to confirm their existence. This research addresses this gap by proposing and implementing a fieldwork validation pipeline. In northern Portugal’s Alto Minho region, we employed this pipeline to verify 237 potential burial mounds identified by an AI-powered algorithm. Fieldwork provided valuable information on the optimal conditions for burial mounds and the specific factors that led the algorithm to err. Based on these insights, we implemented two key improvements to the algorithm. First, we incorporated a slope map derived from LiDAR-generated terrain models to eliminate potential burial mound inferences in areas with high slopes. Second, we trained a Vision Transformer model using digital orthophotos of both confirmed burial mounds and previously identified False Positives. This further refines the algorithm’s ability to distinguish genuine sites. The improved algorithm was then tested in two areas: the original Alto Minho validation region and the Barbanza region in Spain, where the location of burial mounds was well established through prior field work.

GIS are an essential element in archaeology. Their use has become widespread for their potential to store, reference, analyse and visualise spatial information. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, a systematic review of academic peer-reviewed publications related to the use of GIS, as a framework, in archaeology has never been presented before. Our goal in this work is to identify what has been published so far in relation to using GIS in archaeology within a small selected sample. We used the PRISMA guideline to perform a systematic review of 671 publications that we identified using the SCOPUS database and the keywords ‘GIS’ and ‘archaeology’. The collected publications were screened, analysed, and categorized into different relevant categories. Our analysis shows that GIS, in our selected sample, are mostly used for visualization and information management tasks. Moreover, spatial analysis studies were more common than other studies, and theoretical publications are scarce. The lack of a theoretical background in GIS may be the cause of some of the problems related to GIS applications in archaeology.