::: Satellite Discoveres- Eye in the Sky :::

::: Aerial Archaeology Project Reveals Rich Archaeology of Norfolk

The latest phase of an English Heritage backed project to create a digital map of England by collating archaeological information from aerial archive photographs has resulted in nearly 4,000 archaeological discoveries in Norfolk.
 
The major project, called the National Mapping Programme (NMP), uses modern and historic aerial photographs - many of them contained in the National Monuments Record - to identify and analyse archaeological sites that have lain hidden for many years.

Among the 4,000 forgotten sites rediscovered in Norfolk are Bronze Age burial mounds, Iron Age settlements, Roman camps, medieval villages and World War II defences. The project has also created an accurate record of around 2,000 previously known sites.

“The National Mapping Programme is transforming our knowledge of landscape archaeology across England and the team are producing some fantastic results in Norfolk,” reported Helen Winton, Senior Investigator and NMP team leader for English Heritage.

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::: Aerial Pictures Reveal Past Of Hadrian’s Wall

British archaeologists used thousands of aerial photos to reveal more than 2,700 unrecorded historic features of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England.

Among the new features identified by experts from the English Heritage were medieval sheep farms, ancient burial mounds and 19th Century lead mines.

The scientists used more than 30,500 pictures taken during the past 60 years as part of an English Heritage initiative to map and interpret England’s archaeological sites.

The project began in 2002, and includes a wide area on either side of the 73 mile length of the wall from the Solway Plain in Cumbria to Newcastle in the east.

Recorded features of Hadrian’s Wall, a World Heritage Site, include a World War II anti-aircraft gun battery near Cleadon, Tyneside, an Iron Age hillfort near Fourstones, Northumberland, and the abandoned medieval village of East Matfen.

"We need to remember that Hadrian's Wall is not an isolated monument set within a landscape devoid of any other history,” said David MacLeod of English Heritage's Aerial Survey and Investigation team.

"This region saw a tremendous amount of activity before the Romans arrived and after they left, traces and memories of which remain today,” he told BBC News.

"It will help us to understand and manage the rich heritage of human activity that has shaped this landscape, whether it is the remains of a Bronze Age farm or a 20th Century gun battery."

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::: Drought reveals the lost footprints of history from the air

While the summer drought has left fields and gardens parched, it has opened up aerial architectural treasures across the country.

Photographs taken from light aircraft have revealed hundreds of unknown or long forgotten sites. Archaeologists now face a busy autumn, interpreting images that will help shed light on how people lived up to 6,000 years ago.

Dr Toby Driver, of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, said: "It has been a hugely successful year for aerial archaeology. We may not see another like it for a decade.

"I now have months of work to go through the discoveries, notifying local archaeologists and ensuring that some of the most remarkable sites are visited on the ground and studied further."

Among the most significant finds are two 6,000-year-old Neolithic causewayed enclosures near Walton, Radnorshire, and near St Athan airfield, in the Vale of Glamorgan.

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::: Persian Carpet Effect

An intriguing way to look at history, Archaeologists call it the Persian carpet effect.
Imagine you're a mouse running across an elaborately decorated rug. The ground would merely be a blur of shapes and colors. You could spend your life going back and forth, studying an inch at a time, and never see the patterns.

Like a mouse on a carpet, an archaeologist painstakingly excavating a site might easily miss the whole for the parts. That's where the work of aerial photographers such as Georg Gerster comes in.

For four decades, Gerster, 77, has been flying over sites from the Parthenon to Ayers Rock to provide archaeologists with the big picture. Seen from high above, even the most familiar turf can appear transformed, with a coherence and detail invisible on the ground.

"In the Middle Eastern and classical [archaeology] world, it's a tool people recognize as extremely valuable," says archaeologist William Sumner, a University of Chicago professor emeritus, of aerial photography. "The thing about Georg's images is they are superb. If there's anything to be seen, it's in his images."

In Gerster's recent book, The Past From Above: Aerial Photographs of Archaeological Sites (J. Paul Getty Museum), places we've seen a thousand times in pictures from ground level take on a whole new meaning. His photographs dramatize the scale of ancient structures and show them, as if for the first time, in relation to their surroundings.

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:: Aerial Archaeology- Germany to reopen 6,800-year-old mystery circle

20 December 2005

BERLIN - At the winter solstice this week, Germany is to open a replica of a mysterious wooden circle that is believed to be a temple of the sun built by a lost culture 6,800 years ago.

The circle of posts, in a flat river plain at Goseck south of Berlin, has mystified scientists since its discovery in 1991 by an archaeologist studying the landscape from the air. An excavation found post holes and what may be the remains of ritual fires.

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