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Using Google Earth to Find Ancient Cities
An anonymous reader writes "A story in the online site of the Aussie science mag Cosmos discusses how archaeologists are using sophisticated satellite images to find previously undiscovered cities. What 's really cool is how some are simply using Google Earth — and discovering all sorts of previously unknown sites!"
An infra red imaging device, or certain wavelengths of radar should work nicely. And I am sure there are satellites up there that are capable of that.
Imagine the submarine hunting possibilities! No way the military has not at least investigated the technology...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
...I came across Google Earth was in September 2005, and I remember what led me to it was a story about Italian person finding old Roman ruins while discovering some 'formations' near his home village
Move along now, nothing to see here! Go on!
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/radar/sircxsar//ubar1.html
they found a biblical city called ubar in oman this way, by tracing the minute traces left by ancient caravan roads only visible by certain radars on a huge scale
no lost ark, but apparently this is where all that weird stuff called frankincense came from
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Do these cities have StreetView yet? It could provide a vivid picture of what life was like in ancient times. :)
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
In just five minutes I found this weird ancient obelisk!
Obelisk
Wow! A previously unknown sphinx!
Sphinx
Some sort of ancient roadway system. It's a bit hard to make out.
Ancient trade routes
"Yes." She pointed to the screen. "But don't be deceived by what you see here. This satellite image covers fifty thousand square kilometers of jungle. Most of it has never been seen by white men. It's hard terrain, with visibility limited to a few meters in any direction. An expedition could search that area for years, passing within two hundred meters of the city and failing to see it. So I needed to narrow the search sector. I decided to see if I could find the city."
Find the city? From satellite pictures?
"Yes," she said. "And I found it."
Ultraviolet photographs might work, but since water absorbs longer wavelengths infrared photographs may not show anything. On a side note, that's why everything underwater looks blue-green without a supplemental light, the red wavelength has been mostly absorbed.
"Indiana Jones and the Blue Screen of Death"
any technology such as this is invaluable to us archaeologists. You see, these days archaeologists are loath to put their WHS trowels in the ground for a simple reason: archaeology is the unrepeatable experiment. Unlike most sciences, you cannot go back and recover from any mistakes. Once it's up, it's up and that's the end of that. Untold valuable sites have been irreparable screwed up by previous clumsy excavations and thousands of artefacts have horribly degraded due to us not really understanding the conversation process. It's really only a miracle of fate that Howard Carter found Tutankhamen's tomb when he did - a few years before and most what of he discovered would be remembered to us only by grainy sepia photographs. Still, even with the reasonably modern techniques and equipment at his disposable a lot of damage was done and like a forensic site, much of the evidence has been contaminated.
Archaeological investigations these days tend to be for emergency purposes. Or in layman's terms, someone's building a motorway through an iron age hill (as in Ireland), or someone found a Roman bathhouse while pile driving the foundations for an office block. To be fair the latter shouldn't happy as archaeologists are normally called in to do a preliminary investigation before construction, at least in archaeological sensitive places such as London, Paris etc. It's pretty hard to get money for pure archaeology now. Mostly because governments would rather fund other, more pragmatic research fields and secondly because modern archaeologists are a squeamish bunch - if something's sat in situ for two millennia without any problems it can afford to wait a decade or more until adequate funding and a conservation strategy are in place. Nowadays most of the glory is going to the geophys guys and not Indiana Jones.
For this reason any methods which can provide any insight, no matter how small, are gaining ground. Really, despite what most people think of archaeologists we're not treasure hunters. We're trying to piece together the past piece by piece. What we're looking for is not lost cities, but rather more mundane artefacts like field boundaries, foundations, lost turnpike roads between settlements etc. Google Earth maybe good at this sort of thing, maybe even for smaller structures too and maybe very handy when trying to piece together larger landscapes. You're probably not going to find Eldorado though.