Ancient Egypt revealed by modern eyes in the sky
In a computer lab on Birmingham’s Southside, UAB anthropology professor Sarah Parcak scours satellite images for hidden Egyptian archaeological sites half a world away. With the help of the new technology, Parcak and collaborators are hoping to map the sites and explore them before urbanization and development destroy them.
In the new $150,000 lab, equipped with 10 computer workstations running a series of geographic information system and remote sensing programs, Parcak can travel the world, zooming in close enough to note the outlines of forgotten settlements, some buried beneath modern cities.
She has identified more than 100 previously unknown ancient sites, including a lost temple buried beneath agricultural fields, a major town in the East Nile Delta dating to the time of the pyramids, a large monastery from 400 A.D. in Middle Egypt and a massive, largely buried city beneath a field on the East Delta dating to 600 B.C.
That view from the sky is matched up with on-the-ground investigations, traditional earth-digging archeology in which spotted sites are excavated, dated and mapped using GPS technology.
“This technology is changing the way we do archeology,” said Parcak, who travels to Egypt two or three times a year working with her husband, Greg Mumford, who also teaches anthropology at University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Despite all the archaeological attention Egypt has received at the well-known sites, Parcak estimates that only 0.01 percent of the archaeological sites have been identified and studied for a civilization that spanned 6,000 years and covered a landmass of 387,000 square miles.
Parcak’s work has been focused on the flat flood plain of the Nile. The satellite imagery is helping create a better understanding about how the Mediterranean coastline and the course of the Nile have changed through time and how settlements shifted accordingly.
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews//index.ssf?/base/news/1195377767218300.xml&coll=2
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