Archaeology From Space

Archeology gets an assist from imagery taken by spy satellites in the 1960's and declassified in the 1990's. The old images are helping modern archaeologists find ancient ruins in Syria.

The sites are near the ancient fortress of Jebel Khalid, which was established in the wake of conquest of Western Asia by Alexander the Great in the third century BC.

Work led by Ph.D. student Mandy Mottram of the Australian National University uncovered early Islamic pottery factories, mounds of artifacts from 130,000 years ago, and a hilltop complex of megalithic tombs in Euphrates River valley, northeast of the Syrian city Aleppo.

The tombs are similar to chambers of stone called dolmens that are found in Europe.

"The dolmen site in particular is a significant find, because in other parts of the Middle East these structures are usually associated with Bronze Age pastoral peoples,” Mottram said. "Nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralists [shepherds] leave very few archaeological marks, so the find will help us to understand the interplay between pastoralists and farmers at that time."

The imagery comes from the US CORONA program. In some ways it is more useful than modern images because it predates modern human activities in some of the areas. There are limits to it's usefulness, though. Images only exist for areas that were of strategic interest to the US at the time. The entire globe was not mapped. Here's an example of the images they are using. Here is a description of the CORONA program, which used actual film canisters returned to earth from the satellites. Copies of the images are supposed to be housed here in the National Archives, but I did not go rooting around for them.