New atlas to reveal archaeological sites

New methods developed at the University of Arkansas will make decades-old satellite imagery readily available to archeologists and others who need to know what a landscape looked like before the spread of cities and agriculture. For the first time, archeologists can see three-dimensional views of the landscape of the Middle East from 40 years ago.

With a $338,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an award from the American Council of Learned Societies, Jesse Casana and Jackson Cothren will develop an archeological atlas of the Middle East that can easily be used with contemporary mapping applications to pinpoint locations.

In the current issue of Antiquity, Casana, an archeologist who focuses on the Middle East, and Cothren, a geoscientist specializing in geomatics, have published an account of the methods and examples of their work. Geomatics is the art, science and technologies related to the management of geographically referenced information including such areas as geographic information systems, remote sensing, cartography and surveying.

Using declassified images from a government satellite program called CORONA, the researchers are working with high-resolution digital scans distributed by the U.S. Geological Survey of film that was shot between 1967 and 1972. CORONA images from the final years of the program were taken with two cameras simultaneously.