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

Next up from the Google Dog & Pony Show...

[Anonymous Coward]

WMD's in Iraq found!

I use Google Earth...

[Quaoar]

...to find my remote control. Though I guess it's hard to miss anyway, being 10 feet long.

Re:I use Google Earth...

[themoodykid]

Looks like Satoru Iwata found it.

Re:I use Google Earth...

[Concerned Onlooker]

Though I guess it's hard to miss anyway, being 10 feet long.

Yeah, I use a stick, too.

Speaking of which, one day long ago my wife and I were laying on the floor lazily watching TV. We decided to chang the channel but neither of us had the remote in hand. Laying there on the floor with our heads propped against the couch we noticed the remote laying a few feet away. For some reason there was a yardstick lying within reach and my wife grabbed it and began using it to drag the remote towards us. When we realized just how pathetic this little tableau was we jumped up, turned off the TV and went outside.

Re:I use Google Earth...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahah... that's funny...

wife.

Re:frist post!

[MBGMorden]

Aw come on. You never mentioned "All your base" or a "beowulf cluster". What type of slashdotter are you? ;)

Re:Here you go

[General Alcazar]

Try this link

Kick Ass...(!)

[HellYeahAutomaton]

.. So long as he doesn't kill himself geocaching
at that site his find might be worthwhile!

What's buried in my back yard

[dotslasher_sri]

deadbodies.

Re: What's buried in your back yard?

[bergeron76]

My ex-wife.

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.

let me know when

[Anonymous Coward]

Googe Earth can find where I left my damn keys

Re:Here you go

[SolarCanine]

Welcome to the wonderful world of AJAX...

You thought the HTTP protocol was stateless? In the words of Bachman Turner Overdrive, "You ain't seen nothin' yet..."

buried

[RevengeOfPoopJuggler]

What's buried in your back yard?

Those meddling kids and their dopey great dane

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.

Re:I found something I'd lost with Google Earth

[CuBr]

Linkified:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.376078,-71.12621 8&spn=0.004510,0.008827&t=k&hl=en

Re:I found something I'd lost with Google Earth

[RollingThunder]

The easiest way I find is to just take out the "d", at least under Google Earth.

Once that's gone, it's recognized as lat/long.

my backyard?

[polysylabic psudonym]

Not much to be found here. The Romans didn't find their way here, nor the Greeks, nor the Vikings. No populations with higher technology than the boomerang, spear and woomera (that's the spear throwing tool, rather than the rocket range) here until the 18th century, and those pre-european people weren't much into building buildings of the sort that leave a trace. Even our own civilisation's ruins top out at 200 odd years old, and around where I live only to about 80 years old.

Re:my backyard?

[donscarletti]

I'd suggest you stop looking. If you were to find a big pile of shells, your house would be considered both an archaeological site and a sacred place that would be regulated as such.

They are called middens and they are basically dumping grounds for used shellfish eaten by a community. In areas were there was no rock painting, they are the only perminent evidence of settlement.

You do not want to find one of those things where you live.

Re:my backyard?

[Steve Franklin]

Who knows, maybe you'll be the one to find evidence of a forgotten sea-faring neanderthal civilization no one knew about. Try to be a little more open minded.

I can see why...

[Anonymous Coward]

this guy is doing archaeology.

"Italian computer programmer"

Sheesh, imagine the spaghetti code!

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!

My backyard isn't in Google Earth

[Zatar]

My (parent's) house is in Ketchikan, Alaska. Google Earth just shows a big blurry picture of cloud cover. My friend outside of Fairbanks? Big blur. Vacation cabin in Michigan? Big blur.

I mean, the program is cool and all, but I'm really disappointed that it seems the only places you can see very well are the highly-populated/popular places that there's already lots of established pictures of anyway. I'd really like to be able to explore places I can't easily get to otherwise.

I have no idea if they plan to fix this or if anyone even bothers taking high-res pictures of places that aren't militarily interesting (or whatever criteria they use) but so far the program just seems to be a "hey, I can see my own house in the big city" novelty.

Re:My backyard isn't in Google Earth

[FyRE666]

I'd really like to be able to explore places I can't easily get to otherwise.

I think GoogleDatesForNerds is currently under development...

Re:My backyard isn't in Google Earth

[craXORjack]

Google Earth just shows a big blurry picture of cloud cover. My friend outside of Fairbanks? Big blur. Vacation cabin in Michigan? Big blur.

The island where they found King Kong... a big blur of cloud cover.

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.

link to villa

[Polo]

I think this link should show the villa:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=44.881446,10.421513 &spn=0.007150,0.007532&t=k&hl=en

500m

[zoogies]

How do you miss something 500m long? Granted, the world is a big place, but I thought that SOMETHING would have found a great big 500m long object by now.

Re:500m

[ocelotbob]

Same way you miss the Nasca sand art. They seem like odd ditches until you get some perspective. That villa seems like it's just irregular enough to look like it's just another feature of the land. Too insignificant to do major earthmoving, so the farmer who works that piece of land just works around it.

Link to the exact location

[YA_Python_dev]

Yah I just noticed I linked to the map view rather then the satellite view.

Yeah, right. FYI this is the link to the exact location.

New insult

[pardasaniman]

New /. insult.

Your Mama, She's so fat, I typed her name in on google and saw a satellite photo of her!!

Re:frist post!

[Jesus_666]

Well, me and my friends just used a beowulf cluster of computers running Google Earth to find all your base... They're now belong to us. As well as your statue of Natalie Portman. Yes, the naked and petrified one with the hot grits.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Paleomacus]

Hey...I can see Uranus from here!

reminds me of the story...

[blue_adept]

A fellow used google maps to discover some ruins in his own back yard. while digging up the ruins, he comes across some cable, and tells his his neighbour "well there you have it, this proves that our ancient ancestors had internet".

His neighbor replies "that's nothing, yesterday I used google to find some ruins in *my* backyard. When I dug them up, I didn't find ANY cable at all. That proves that our ancient ancestors had wireless".

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:Kettle meet Pot!

[Skreems]

You, sir, are fucking hilarious :-)

Keyhole/Google Earth location file

[jgaynor]

I made up a quick-n-dirty keyhole file of the place:

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jgaynor/random/slashdo t-09-16-05.kmz

For the paranoid, feel free to save it and then open it up from within Google Earth. For the rest of us just launch it directly.

that's nothing

[pyrrho]

I was able to find a lost baseball in my back yard using Google Earth.

What buried in my backyard?

[dev32810]

Jimmy Hoffa...

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.

Google Maps doesn't have the resolution

[dlleigh]

You have to use Google Earth to get the nice six inch resolution which allows you to see the dish.

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:Wait a minute...

[jrockway]

I'm sorry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.

What's it called now? Urectum.

Look at that resolution change!

[FooAtWFU]

Just a little ways over to the east you can notice that the satellite resolution drops off precipitously. If the satellite had just switched off a few seconds earlier (or is it on a few sconds later?) I guess that this villa would have remained unfound.

I'm also a little bitter because the satellite maps around where I live

are pretty lousy quality - and just a screen to the southwest, the resolution picks up again. Phooey.

The other thing annoys me is that they don't pixelate the image when you zoom in, they just cut it off. Check around here, for instance. It would be nice to have the general diffuse pixellated background anyway, if only to get a rough idea of the terrain when you're in Overlay mode. Notice also that if you zoom out even one step you can't get the little side streets anymore. No-fun at all!

Re: What's buried in your back yard?

[sik0fewl]

You have to check "Post Anonymously" before you press submit.

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.

USAPhotoMaps and MSN Virtual Earth

[donutello]

USAPhotoMaps is excellent for downloading and viewing USGS topo maps. The interface is terrible and clunky to use but once you figure it out, it's awesome. It also has a database of USGS landmarks that you can use. I use it when planning hiking trips.

I know we hate Microsoft here but VirtualEarth has much higher resolution pictures of many areas. In general, I've found that once you're outside the major metropolitan areas MSNs maps are much better than Google's.