Google Earth Used to Find Ancient Roman Villa

cavehobbit writes "Google Earth leads to an archeology find, according to a Nature article. From the article: 'Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river ...' What's buried in your back yard?"

Comments

Re:Here you go

[General Alcazar]

Try this link

re: What's buried in your back yard?"

[xmas2003]

I just had 20 tons of stamped concrete poured into my backyard - I'm kinda curious to see if that shows up on the next satellite pass. Right now, the Boulder, Colorado footage comes from the summer of 2002 (easy to tell because we had a major drought) - sure would be nice if they date stamped the imagery.

Fantastic

[fsh]

I hope we see a lot more of this. It's like when airplanes became common, and suddenly lots of great archeaological sites were found, like the Nasca desert drawings.

I'm sure Google isn't exactly hurt by the excellent free press, either.

I found something I'd lost with Google Earth

[dlleigh]

I had loaned six foot aluminum parabolic dish to a church group a number of years back so that they could try to pick up some satellite broadcasts. They never did use it and I forgot all about it.

Along comes Google Earth with six inch resolution in Cambridge, Massachusetts and, lo and behold, there the thing is sitting upside down on their roof, next to the upright dish (which is casting a shadow) that they are currently using.

To see it, go to:
42d 22' 34.0" N 71d 07' 34.4" W
and zoom in to about 50 feet.

Village Resevoirs

[martalli]

This reminds me of when I was living in India back in 1996. In an effort to find good sites for village resevoirs for irrigation, India used its new space satellites to find appropriate spots. Low and behold, many of the best sites held actual remains of previous resevoirs, which had been abandoned centuries before!

I used Google Earth to find something...

[rindeee]

...in my neck of the woods. It's not nearly as cool as the find in the article, but it was cool to me. Being a trail-runner and ultra-marathoner, I'm always on the lookout for new trails. There are some good trails not far from my home that I like to run. I always wished that I could just run to the trail, but the roads between home and trail were simply not safe for running. I had tried to use my GPS to map out the trail and some of the woods near my house that I knew should be the closest point near the trail, but the density of the trees (even in winter) rendered my GPS useless. Using Google Earth a while back, I was able to get a nice birds eye view of the entire area near my home including some old access roads that I didn't know existed. Now, I can leave my house, run to the back of my subdivision, down a dirt log-road and through about 100M of woods where I pick up the "top" of the main trail that I run. I even printed it out in tiles on 8.5x11 paper which I scotch-taped together into a poor-mans map. Again, it's not a big deal to most, but to me it was priceless.

gis existed long before it was available in google

[aleator]

i just read this "story" and want to exchange some remarks with the world about it:

GIS (geographical information systems) are using satellite pictures now for decades to monitor and work with them. from farming (how much water is in my soil), geology, archeology and so on, people already use this technologies in daily use.

for example see here:
http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/remote_sensing/ind ex.php
also wikipedia has a nice article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gis

the great thing google provides is that everybody - no matter if professor in geology or not - can now have a look at the data and do something with it. a region that never was of much interest to experts can become of interest by the people living there and doing the first step of discovery they themselves.

google did not re-invent gis and its application. but what google did was to offer parts of the data satellites collect daily to the "people" with a simple user interface.

everybody can have a look at our planet from space and do something with the data.

Re:Google Maps for future archeologists

[PsiPsiStar]

...Except that this digital info is not likely to survive quite as well as the stone buildings from 1000 years ago.

Heck, even our VHS tapes wont be viewable by most people soon, but I can see the photos taken by my great grandparents.

We're creating a history which is increasingly malleable and vulnerable to destruction.

Technology is great, but tech wasn't meant to last or to be archived.

It would not surprise me

[jd]

The 12,000 year old site currently being excavated in the town I grew up was discovered by chance during a severe drought - discoloration clearly marked outlines of ancient structures. The site has been worked by archaeologists for about 7 years now and they're uncovering a vast amount each year.

(Having said that, the entire settlement is believed to be hundreds - if not thousands - of times larger than the area actually examined by archaeologists. Add in nearby standing stones and round barrows, and the area in need of study is maybe hundreds of thousands of times larger than what they've studied. Makes you wonder what they haven't found!)

You can't expect a good pair of eyes (and a brain) to exist in every town or village that has ancient remains. On the other hand, with something like Google Maps, all it really requires is someone anywhere taking the time to look through the images.

Well, if they're sophisticated enough, all they really need to do is write a good image processing algorithm that detects definite artifacts in the image (straight lines, circles, etc) that do NOT correspond to anything that is a definite surface structure. All the person need do then is search through the candidate images, not the entire database, which would be a much more practical task to do.

Ideally, you'd use several layers of image processing, to whittle down the pool of images to highly probable cases, then subtract out known archaeological sites from a database.

Really, really ideally, you'd program the individual layers as BOING components and run the computation part of it as a gigantic @Home venture, as this would be massively parallelizable and sufficiently CPU intensive for most academics who would be interested in such work to not be able to afford a computer (or cluster) that could actually carry out the work in a reasonable timeframe.

Hmmmm. It's a pity Google don't cover enough of the UK in enough depth to be able to do good work there.

Re:It would not surprise me

[jd]

The world has plenty of futures to choose from, but it only has one past and if you lose something from it, it can't be replaced. As such, I'd argue that serious Government funding of archaeological projects (as a science, as a method of recording the past and as a method of conserving heritage) makes considerable sense.

In England, you can do almost nothing in the way of construction without an archaeological survey of a site. Which is a sound and rational policy. Or would be, if the Government contributed towards the cost, because then the survey might have some quality to it.

In consequence, you might well expect construction firms to be interested in finding where sites were, so they could be somewhere else. Or, finding them now BEFORE they buy the land, to give the archaeologists time to dig everything of importance up by the time the land deal goes through.

So there are plenty of people who might very well have a use for such data. Certainly, the current hit-or-miss method doesn't help in conservation (obscurity simply offers more opportunity to damage or destroy in ignorance). I guess the way I look at it is that a gravity wave detector was built in Scotland for about $30bln. and it was really just a repeat of the M-M ether experiment, so guaranteed to fail.

If you can afford to throw away thirty billion dollars on something you know won't work when you've finished it, you've enough spare cash to completely excavate and document virtually every potential archaeological site in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And STILL have change for a quiet evening down the pub.

Rebuilding New Orleans is going to cost something like $200 billion, but without new taxes, the costs are going to end up on the US national debt to be paid later. If you can do that, you can surely borrow enough to get every unemployed person in America in one gigantic human chain to go through the Amazon, locating ruins. It would probably cost less and if the Governments agreed on profit-sharing, the added tourism would be far more likely to pay the costs back than President Bush's New Orleans vision ever will.

In other words, the money isn't the problem. There will always be someone with money you could convince. The problem is getting enough data together to be able to convince people that it is worth investing the money.

Oh, and you're absolutely right about the importance of the data and context. Which is why I was bloody furious with the fiasco over Seahenge, where the archaeologists kept only one copy of all the notes in a single building which was poorly maintained. They'd excavated the entire site, so the ONLY existant data was in the notes, which were destroyed when an electrical fire burned the place to the ground.

Serious archaeologists will never convince the average person not to be destructive, with incidents like that. You only need one or two - reputations can be destroyed far more easily than they can be built up.

It didn't help matters when the US forces in Iraq were shown to have damaged or destroyed ancient sites (including Babylon) and to have stolen artifacts from archaeological sites. Again, what does this teach others? That such stuff is yours for the taking, if you're "bad" enough.

Nor did it help when an ancient North American site, held secret for many years, was handed over to the US Government and promptly pilfered. Quite probably by people within the Government, as they're the ones who knew about it.

You teach by example, and the examples that have been shown aren't good. As I see it, the only way to build a good image is to make communities more actively involved in preservation - not as a burden but as an opportunity. But you'll only succeed if those with the money (and authority) back that up by making it more profitable to be honest than corrupt.

Re: What's buried in your back yard?

[nyri]

My ex-wife.

Am I only one having this eery uncomfortable feeling that this guy isn't joking?

I keep tabs on my mom...

[cgenman]

Ever since I've moved out here five years ago I've had a yearly ritual to find out how long it would take to drive back home from Boston. Long story short, while doing this last month with Google Earth it appeared that my mother had drained our pool, and finally finished putting up that old porch roof I had started years ago. I gave her a call and yup, the pool had been drained about 6 months back and the roof (a big white rectangle) was finished by a friend.

37d 23' 55.50 N, 121d 59' 31.63" W

You can even see that the backyard has had most of the grass removed, though the patch of the garden she has fixed up nicely is underneath a shadow.

It also turns out that my local school, which closed it's doors years ago, has re-opened as a school... They've re-painted the 4-square and tetherball courts.

Personally I can't wait for google 3D maps. Nothing cures heartache like a VRML walkthrough. Hopefully they will add avatar and family chat options as well. Of course, I would love to have Google Earth connected to Google Chat, so that you could click on someone's physical location to open a chat session with them... I'd love to chat with old friends by going to their house.