Just English Magazine
Home arrow Magazine arrow Feature arrow Pyramids from Space
Choose Your Category    Year    Month

   Pyramids from Space by Sara Hall
Hits 682 hits    E-mail Tell friends   
Pyramids from Space 
 

In the past, archaeology was a very slow affair. It is hard to see evidence of buildings or settlements buried by the earth when you are standing on the ground. For this reason archaeology proceeded in pretty much the same way for centuries until the invention of the airplane. When archaeologists were able to take to the air, they could suddenly see all kinds of things that used to be invisible to them from the ground. Perhaps the most famous example is the Nazca Lines in Peru. It was only from the air that archaeologists suddenly saw that the civilisation at Nazca had produced something totally remarkable that had been totally overlooked before.

So if air travel made the first great leap in archaeological discovery, what has made the next? The answer is satellite imaging. We are all used to satellite images of the ground from applications like Google Earth. This has shown us a

totally new way to appreciate our own locality. We can look at any point on our Earth and zoom in until we find our very own house, school or playground.

This new way of looking at the Earth started to intrigue archaeologists in a wide variety of universities and scientific institutes around the world. However, conventional satellite imaging offered very little that aerial photography did not. Except for scale, a view of the Earth from space gives pretty much the same picture as a view from a plane photographing the ground below from thousands of feet up. It was only when archaeologists started to use a variety of imaging technologies that they began to see so much more than ever before under the ground.

The most exciting discoveries have come from a team led by Dr Sarah Parcak, an archaeologist who receives funding from the North American Space Agency (NASA) for her work at the University of Alabama in the US. Dr Parcak used NASA satellites to survey the deserts of Egypt. Her analysis of the images identified 17 new pyramids, 1,000 undiscovered burial sites and over 3,000 unknown ancient settlements. This is the biggest leap in Egyptology since the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb by Howard Carter in 1922!



To view the complete article, subscribe to Just English magazine.

 
  Last Updated ( Thursday, 03 November 2011 17:40 )