An interesting and perhaps unexpected result from the Cold War...
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CORONA was the codename for the United States' first photographic spy satellite mission. For 12 years, it brought back intel on the USSR, China, and the Middle East. But that wasn't all its grainy, black and white images captured—it turns out it also caught an incredible number of undiscovered ancient settlements.
In a fantastic story on National Geographic, Dan Vergano reports on the Society for American Archaeology's annual meeting, where a team from the University of Arkansas presented a study showing how the declassified CORONA images from the Middle East actually reveal an incredible wealth of previously-unknown ruins, from Bronze Age cities to ruined canals and roads across Syria and Turkey.
http://gizmodo.com/how-cold-war-spy-satellites-revealed-10-000-lost-cities-1567729482
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Archaeologist Jesse Casana of the University of Arkansas describes some of the sites as "gigantic," with two sprawling over more than 123 acres; Casana suspects the largest, which appear to include aged walls and citadels, were Bronze Age cities.
And as he explains, the photos' age matters. Though current satellites produce images superior to these grainy decades-old ones, "we can't see a site that someone has covered up with a building," and the fact that they were taken before cities like Iraq's Mosul and Jordan's Amman swelled makes them invaluable.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/04/29/cold-war-images-spill-new-secrets-lost-cities/?intcmp=features
Images from CORONA can be viewed
here (http://corona.cast.uark.edu/index.html#bbox=2525581,2632613,5969527,4567387).
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140425-corona-spy-satellite-archaeology-science/
This is such a cool story!
When I was in mexico last year, I visited the Mayan ruins in Ek Balam (which were almost completely buried, but was discovered by satellite anaylsis) - there is a huge section of the ruins still to be excavated, amazing find !
I keep waiting for them to find a pyramid under the ice in South Pole - I hear Weyland Corp is looking for it ;)
Holy crap, very cool. Thanks Steve.