During the Cold War, American spy planes were sent throughout Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, capturing images of military targets behind the Iron Curtain and inside other nations of interest. Most of these missions involved capturing images of cities or military outposts, but they also inadvertently caught sight of something else: answers to ancient mysteries.
Declassified spy plane photos over Jordan have revealed desert kites, ancient hunting traps that were used 5000 to 8000 years ago. Image by Emily Hammer and Jason Ur/Advances in Archaeological Practice / CC BY 2.0
A new paper published in the journal Advances in Archaeological Practice says those declassified photos from U2 spy planes have unearthed a trove of archaeological data that answers important questions of how ancient people lived 5000 to 8000 years ago.
By analyzing thousands of high-altitude spy plane photographs, researchers Emily Hammer of the University of Pennsylvania and Jason Ur of Harvard University were able to identify prehistoric hunting traps, 3000-year-old irrigation canals and marsh villages now lost to time. This is the first time U2 spy plane photos have been used for archaeological research.
‘The photos provide a fascinating look at the Middle East several decades ago, showing, for example, historical Aleppo long before the massive destruction wrought in the ongoing civil war,’ says Hammer in a statement about her research. ‘Plus, the work and the accompanying online resources will allow other researchers to identify and access U2 photos for the first time.’
A bird’s-eye view gave researchers insight into how the Assyrians managed the land and built their empire. Image by Emily Hammer and Jason Ur/Advances in Archaeological Practice / CC BY 2.0
Previously, historical aerial documentation was limited to images from the CORONA program, a spy satellite project that the US ran from 1959 to 1972. But only the images from the last five years of that program were high enough resolution to be suitable for archaeological research, and by that time some historical sites had already disappeared. The declassified U2 images were taken earlier and at resolutions high enough to allow archaeologists to spot important features that the CORONA images couldn’t reveal.
To analyze the images, Hammer and Ur had to transport the original film rolls from the storage center of the National Archives in Kansas to a branch in Maryland dedicated to aerial film. Then researchers unspooled hundreds of feet of film negatives and painstakingly identified significant frames, snapping photos of those negatives with a specialized camera. Those images were then matched up with coordinates of modern-day places for comparison.
‘As you turn the spool of a film roll following the path of the U2 plane, you may not know exactly what you’ll see in unfamiliar places, so there’s often a sense of exploration and discovery,’ Hammer says. ‘Other times, the pilots were flying over regions I knew by heart from travel and study, and I would almost hold my breath, hoping that the plane had veered just a little to the right or left.’
All that tedious work paid off. In eastern Jordan, researchers found images of ancient hunting traps called desert kites. These stone-walled structures date back 5000 to 8000 years ago and were used to capture gazelle and other desert animals. Desert kites were used throughout Jordan, but agricultural development in the west had destroyed most of the trap remains. What remained in the east were mere ghosts of the original structures, just barely visible in the U2 photos taken at 70,000 feet.
In northern Iraq, researchers spotted an ancient canal system that points to how the Assyrians managed to build an empire in that part of the world. ‘The Assyrians built the first large, long-lasting, multi-cultural empire of the ancient world, so many people are interested in how they organized territory, controlled people, built their huge cities, and managed the land,’ she says. ‘The irrigation system fed the royal capitals, made agricultural surplus production possible, and provided water to villages.’
Images of Southern Iraq showed how the Marsh Arabs lived before hydroelectric dams and forced relocation shifted their communities elsewhere. Image by Emily Hammer and Jason Ur/Advances in Archaeological Practice / CC BY 2.0
Researchers were able to uncover more recent mysteries as well. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the construction of hydroelectric dams in Turkey, Syria and Iraq and pressure from Saddam Hussein’s government forced several marshland communities in Southern Iraq to migrate to other areas. These Marsh Arab peoples ‘lived a unique lifestyle there for thousands of years, herding water buffalo, building houses and all manner of things out of reeds, living on floating islands of reeds, planting date palms, and fishing,’ Hammer says. With the U2 data, researchers were able to map out these marsh villages, giving insight into what these communities looked like before they left – and what some of the earliest Mesopotamian cities might’ve looked like as well.
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