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

::: 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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