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Using Google Earth to Find Ancient Cities

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Jan 07, 2008 01:00 PM
from the hey-umm-guys-it's-over-here dept.
Science
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!"
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story

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Submission: Using Google Earth to find ancient lost cities by Anonymous Coward
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Using Google Earth to Find Ancient Cities 50 Comments More /

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      • Easy. They want to find where the little green men on Mars used to have their cities!

        Seriously, though, if anyone's thinking about pointing a satellite back at Earth, why not have an archaeologist looking at the feeds for just the purpose TFS (can't read the article do to /.edness) suggests?
          • The mirror is slashdotted, the original article is working fine.

            Makes you wonder why they bothered mirrororing it...
          • I didn't reply to any comment with any link in it.

            I replied to a reply to a comment that had a link. That server has been at times slashdotted too.

            So sorry for your sake that I don't click on every link in every post between the submission and the post to which I'm replying, but some of us have things to do besides look at goatse and myminicity redirects.

  • Work underwater? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I RTFA and as a scuba-diver I'm curious if this technology can be used to detect underwater structures?

    • Re:Work underwater? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AndGodSed (968378) on Monday January 07 2008, @01:18PM (#21944242) Homepage Journal
      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...

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Water absorbs electromagnetic waves very quickly, making radar useless for detecting underwater objects. Accoustic waves are propagated very well though, which makes sonar an excellent choice for underwater surveying. The only thing satellites can image is the ocean surface. If the objects of interest are in very shallow water and visible from the surface then satellite images may be useful. Anything deeper than a few feet won't be detectable without side scan sonar.

    • Re:Work underwater? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NorthWestFLNative (973147) on Monday January 07 2008, @01:40PM (#21944524) Journal
      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.
    • I looked at some wreck sites I know and could not see any hints of the wrecks.

      Besides, after a few hundred years wrecks don't look like anything from close up unless you really know what you're looking for.

      • I wish you wouldn't give your cities such tongue-blasted hard names to pronounce! "R'lyeh" -- wtf?

        Yours truly,

        Nyarlathotep
  • ...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
    • Archaeologists have been using aerial photos almost forever. Google just makes these more accessable. Even flying over an area in a microlight helps show up details of old structures etc as variances in the way vegetation grows etc.
  • http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/radar/sircxsar//ubar1.html [nasa.gov]

    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

    • satellite imagery (Score:5, Insightful)

      by l2718 (514756) on Monday January 07 2008, @01:37PM (#21944484)
      You are right to point at the older story -- we need to make a distinction. The scientific point here is the use of satellite imagery to locate old cities. To social point is that Google Earth has made satellite images infinitely more accessible -- you don't need to be part of NASA anymore.

      • To social point is that Google Earth has made satellite images infinitely more accessible -- you don't need to be part of NASA anymore.

        You haven't needed to be part of NASA - ever.

        Seriously - aerial and satellite photography has been openly available for decades. All you had to have was either a) cash to have them taken, or b) the patience to search the available archives. A model railroad club I was a member of was using 1 meter imagery from the state archives as far back as 1992.

        "Unknow

  • Nice, but. . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zenaku (821866) on Monday January 07 2008, @01:25PM (#21944334)
    Do these cities have StreetView yet? It could provide a vivid picture of what life was like in ancient times. :)

  • It's laugably easy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation (858215) on Monday January 07 2008, @01:28PM (#21944372)

    In just five minutes I found this weird ancient obelisk!

    Obelisk [google.com]

    Wow! A previously unknown sphinx!

    Sphinx [google.com]

    Some sort of ancient roadway system. It's a bit hard to make out.

    Ancient trade routes [google.com]

  • Michael Crichton had the idea in 1980's Congo (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2008, @01:31PM (#21944410)
    "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."

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by xenocide2 (231786)
      Yes, but the difference is that we're not limiting the people viewing the pictures to Jane Goodall. That's the social point here -- getting the data is tricky, but sifting through it is simple enough. That's why many scientists guard their data carefully before publication I suppose; they don't want someone else beating them to the discoveries.
    • The first usage of aerial photography for archaeological purposes dates back into the 1920's. Using aerial photography and radar for searching out sites of archaeological interest was covered in National Geographic back in the 1950's. I remember seeing in my dad's photogrammetry magazines from the 1960's, aerial photography services specifically advertising their availability for archaeological surveys. (As well as multiple articles in the magazines on that very topic.) A book of NASA terrestrial photography I own from the 1970's dedicates an entire chapter to the usage of satellite photography for archaeological purposes.
       
      At best, Crichton independently reinvented a technique already well known in professional circles.

  • That's nothing... (Score:5, Funny)

    by pmike_bauer (763028) on Monday January 07 2008, @01:40PM (#21944534)
    ...google earth now finds your keys

  • The reason why these archaeologists are having so much success is because Google's satellite imagery is ancient!

    I mean, rather than seeing some roads near my house all I see is dirt and trees!

  • Next movie in the series (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2008, @01:47PM (#21944652)
    "Indiana Jones and the Blue Screen of Death"

  • What will they think of next? (Score:5, Funny)

    by AngryNick (891056) on Monday January 07 2008, @01:56PM (#21944792) Homepage Journal
    First impact craters ( How to Discover Impact Craters with Google Earth [slashdot.org]), now ancient cities!?! I'm still looking for my car.

  • Less glorious than it sounds, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CuriousCuller (1198941) on Monday January 07 2008, @04:22PM (#21946782)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nicklott (533496)
      Enjoy it while it lasts, as soon as Google/TeleAtlas get wind of it they will be round for their commercial royalties. Don't laugh; I know of at least one government department that has had to block access to G Maps to prove to them that no one on site is using it and so avoid the royalty fee.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mr_mischief (456295)
        Ley lines probably do exist in some form or another. Magnetic deposits in the crust, auroras, the Earth's own main magnetic field and all kinds of things mean it's not completely improbable that lines of energy flow from one point of the globe to another naturally. The major magnetic field of the Earth from its rotating iron and nickel fore surely has fluctuations in it that cause energy imbalances. Those imbalances will be settled by moving electrons around.

        That it's some mystical "mana" energy that flows
        • "Ley lines probably do exist in some form or another."

          Of course they exist. They are lines that connect points of gullibility :)
          • If you don't believe that short, small, dynamic bursts of energy from one point to another sometimes happen, then why don't you show us the evidence to refute it?

            Do you really think all air is equally conductive? Do you think that discharges of static happen in a perfect sphere? Does the ionosphere reflect man-made radio waves only at certain angles and not natural radiation? Do clouds, hills, and deposits of metal in the ground not effect the shape of magnetic fields? DO you think magnetic fields interacti

            • Then stop responding to things you didn't read.
              You mean like the strange punctuation at the end of his reply? I believe it is called a smiley and you may want to look up its meaning.

                • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                  by Pfhorrest (545131)

                  Of course even if we found a way to tap those flows, corporations, governments and religions would all try to claim control of it, or abolish it as contrary to their plans.

                  Not to mention the wise old adage, TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. If you could somehow tap energy from the Earth's magnetic fields, the Earth's magnetic fields would weaken. And unlike most other power sources on Earth (excepting nuclear), the planet's magnetism is not solar-powered, and the Earth will not recharge its magnetic field naturally. The Earth's magnetosphere is responsible for many important life-sustaining functions, such as protecting us all, in non-polar regions at lea

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by mr_mischief (456295)
                I think much of what people think of as magical is very often an oral and literary history of the misunderstandings and exaggerations of real, verifiable phenomena of a completely non-magical nature.

                In the particular case of ley lines many possible phenomena like magnetic ores, auroras, swap gas, early morning fog over distant mountains, fault lines, weather fronts, and maybe even stratus clouds could have been seen as evidence of something we'd explain away in the days of science and skepticism. If you con
        • I've an interesting anecdote along these lines (no pun intended).

          The people I work for are somewhat floofy new-age spiritualists. During my first week at this job, they had some 'feng-shuei' person over with a pair of straight metal rods with little right-angle bends at the ends for handles - "dowsing rods" - to detect where the "magnetic ley lines" of the building were, and thus how to align the furniture. Said person would walk around the building, "dowsing rods" in hand, and every so often then would swi

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