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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?"
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...to find my remote control. Though I guess it's hard to miss anyway, being 10 feet long.
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deadbodies.
My ex-wife.
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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.
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I'm sure Google isn't exactly hurt by the excellent free press, either.
fsh
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.
this guy is doing archaeology.
"Italian computer programmer"
Sheesh, imagine the spaghetti code!
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!
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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.
...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.
I think this link should show the villa:
3 &spn=0.007150,0.007532&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=44.881446,10.42151
Yeah, right. FYI this is the link to the exact location.
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New /. insult.
Your Mama, She's so fat, I typed her name in on google and saw a satellite photo of her!!
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".
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
...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's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
(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.
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