GHN Press Coverage

Spy satellites watch ancient ruins

April 2011

By Dan Vergano

Indiana Jones seems a bit more like James Bond in archaeology these days, with the intrepid explorers of the ancient world growing ever more fond of high-tech tools.

Archaeological site of Umma, in present-day Iraq, taken in 2003. By Global Heritage Network, Digital

Everything from laser mapping to radioactive dating has been added to the spadework that once defined archaeology. One that might make the most difference?

Spy satellites.

“The ability to survey substantial amounts of remote structures from space is immensely appealing,” said Stony Brook University archaeologist Elizabeth Stone, at the recent Society for American Archaeology meeting in Sacramento. “Entire, unsuspected building sites can suddenly be seen,” Stone said, displaying new views of Iraq’s 3000 B.C. city of Kish, (” the first city founded after the Flood,” basically the Sumerian version of Noah’s flood in cuneiform records) at the meeting.

But that’s not all satellites can do for archaeology, and really, for everyone interested in the past. In March, the Global Heritage Fund launched its ” Global Heritage Network,” in cooperation with Google Earth and private imaging satellite firm DigitalGlobe, an ” early warning and threat detection system” for archaeological sites. In essence, antiquity now has its own spy agency, created to allow armchair archaeologists (as well as real ones), to watch for looting, disasters and other calamities at some of the most endangered sites of human history.

“Some of these places are being treated like junk,” says Jeff Morgan, executive director of the Global Heritage Fund, the Palo Alto, Calif., nonprofit organization dedicated to preservation of World Heritage Sites. The sites include some 911 cultural locations, ranging from Pompeii to Angkor Wat, deemed especially significant by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). “Our goal is to build a worldwide network,” Morgan says, of scholars, lawyers and people living near the sites to aid in their conservation.

As an added bonus, anyone online can explore the sites, seeing video, maps and slideshows that put UNESCO’s records to shame.

DigitalGlobe has contributed overhead imagery of about 600 sites to kick-start the project. Each site (580 now are in the network) will get a regularly-updated assessment.

“Ideally, the most-endangered sites will get the most frequent updates,” Morgan says, sites such as Ur in modern-day Iraq, damaged by Saddam Hussein’s historically-inaccurate restoration efforts, and the 12th-Century temple complex of Banteay Chhmar in Cambodia, looted of statues for decades.

“Monitoring sites and looking for changes fits very comfortably with what we already do for our customers,” says Chuck Herring of DigitalGlobe, based in Longmont, Colo. With increasing numbers of private spy satellites overhead, the network can get daily updates for sites, weather permitting. “The experts on the ground know their sites very well and can spot changes very quickly,” Herring says.

Obviously, he adds, a lot of the most endangered sites, such as the Maya ruins in areas run by drug traffickers or buried cities in war-torn regions of the world such as Iraq, aren’t places that monitors can always reach easily or safely. Umma, yet another ancient city in Iraq, from around 2,300 B.C., “looks like a moonscape,” Stone said, a product of the widespread looting that took place after the 2003 war.

Looting remains the bane of archaeologists, Stone noted, but other threats also loom for many sites. Development, from farmers clearing new fields to parking lots for tourists, encroaches on many of them. Natural disasters can also wreak havoc — last year’s hurricane winds tearing up trees that held together Maya sites was a common complaint among archaeologists at the meeting — and also threaten many sites.

“We’re seeing most of the sites are just being neglected,” Morgan says. “That’s why we have to involve the people who live nearby.” Tourism that preserves the sites might be the best way to keep them from crumbling further, he suggests, and provide local folks a better living. “Right now, we are seeing tourists run rampant over sites,” he says. “The first step we hope for (from the network), is letting people realize how much they are losing.”