Saturday, May 28, 2011

Aerial Archaeology and New Pyramids

The BBC says infrared imaging from satellites has located 17 new pyramids in Egypt, along with thousands of tomb/home/town sites. The Week has a concise summation and video here.

Two of the new pyramids are near Saqqara, and excavations are underway to prove/disprove their existance. (that's Giza--not Saqqara--in the pretty picture.)

Dr. Hawass is not happy and is very critical of the new documentary based on the satellite research. Here are quotes from him, along with more details about the discoveries.

It's all led to a 90-minute BBC special called "Egypt's Lost Cities." (Bummer! I don't get the BBC station anymore.)

Aerial archaeology is almost as interesting as underwater archaeology, huh?

All this seems a very natural outgrowth of aerial photography--the kind that discovered many ancient sites in the Picardie region of France, forty or fifty years ago.

Roger Agache plotted out hundreds of Roman and Celtic homes and farms by taking pictures from a plane. Those photos revealed the patterns of buried ruins. That's one of his photographs at left, showing a Bronze Age funerary site at Noyelles-sur-Mer.

Sometimes a dusting of snow made the outlines of old fences or walls clear; sometimes it was the patterns or color in the grain.

Just in the last couple of years, the research is available online and in English, describing not only the pictures, but the on-the-ground excavations. Here's the site.

Many other researchers carry on aerial archaeology, but I'm more into Gaul than Stonehenge. So Agache's work and the excavations it inspired interests me more.

2 comments:

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Anonymous said...

doe sanybody has an update on the status of excavayion of these 'new' pyramids found through the satellites ? I've been searxhing the web but cannot find ant info . Thanks Annemie