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!

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!

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

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".

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.