Bangalore: Satellite photos of Talakad, an ancient city located on the banks of the Cauvery, near Mysore, have found several man-made canals which, archaeologists say, lend weight to the famous curse that brought this temple destination down.
According to legend, Talakad was swept away by sand dunes after it was cursed by Alamelamma -- wife of Tirumala II, the defeated king of Srirangapatnam --who killed herself after Mysore king Raja Wodeyar took over in 1610.
Before dying she said Talakad would become sand, Malangi (a nearby village) a whirlpool and the Mysore Rajas will fail to beget heirs, a curse which is still said to be acting on the royal family.
The research, which was conducted by the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in collaboration with the state archaeology department, Karnataka, found a well-developed canal system extending a few kilometres from Talakad to Cauvery. "We analysed the site through geospatial maps recorded by a satellite using infrared and radar technology," said MB Rajani, the project head. "A GPS survey was done on the site for more accuracy. By analysing data and comparing it with historical evidence, we were able to arrive at the findings."
The findings support the 400-year-old curse theory, but experts are unsure how such a well-designed and fertile city, which had an elaborate water supply system, could fall victim to sand dunes. Archaeologists believe the canals are only the tip of the iceberg. Supporting the NIAS finding is an inscription found at Malingi. "The inscription says land near the temples of Talakad was marshland.
There was no water source in Talakad. The water could have been brought into the city through the canals," an archaeological department official said. Past excavations, he said, have revealed water reservoirs in the temple city.
Found via Google Earth at the following coordinates: 52.108914°, -4.707867°
"A HUGE ancient fish trap more than 250 metres long and probably at least 1,000 years old has just been discovered in the Teifi estuary.
The underwater structure was first identified on aerial photographs and a recent exploratory dive at the site near Poppit has revealed the structure is protruding about 30 cm above the sand, allowing for a fuller investigation by divers.
A collaborative project is currently underway between Pembrokeshire College and the Dyfed Archaeological Trust, and members of the public are being asked to help with information for research into the conundrum of the ‘Poppit fish-trap’.
Dr Ziggy Otto, lecturer in the coastal zone and marine environment research unit at Pembrokeshire College, explained: "A large, underwater structure has been identified on aerial photographs and there can be little doubt that this rather impressive – and quite apparently man-made -structure is an ancient fish-trap.
"The structure is entirely underwater (at all stages of the tide); it has never been surveyed, but is approximately 260 metres long, and is possibly made of locally quarried rock, although use of boulders carried in during the last glaciation cannot be ruled out either.
"Its age is unknown, but because of its now entirely subtidal position, this fish-trap is very old, possibly dating back more than 1,000 years, when the sea level was lower and the entrance to the Teifi Estuary further towards the Poppit side."
He adds that the structure’s orientation precludes the possibility that it was designed to catch migratory fish, such as salmon and sea trout, going up the Teifi.
"The structure is a true conundrum, and certainly worthwhile investigating further, because it forms part of the historic and cultural seascape of the area."
The fish-trap can be viewed on Google Earth, north-west of the RNLI station at Poppit in front of the cliffs. If members of the public have any information, however anecdotal or minor, the investigators would like to hear from them. "
Anthropologists, with the assistance of satellite imagery, have discovered the remains of a series of ancient canals, located just south of the Salt River, near the very heart of downtown Mesa, Arizona.
The existence of the canal system, built in the Salt River valley centuries ago by the Hohokam, has long been known, but the extent of this most recent discovery has caught some experts by surprise.
Jerry B. Howard, curator of anthropology at the Arizona Museum of Natural History is one of the experts involved in archaeological studies of the region being conducted before the city of Mesa can permit the area to be redeveloped. Planners had intended to build a massive water park on the property, but all bets are off as to whether that plan can still move forward.
"Through satellite imagery, sometimes we can actually see the canals, kind of a signature of them," states Howard. "The soil in them is different than the other soil around them, more porous and moist.”
The area, larger in scope than previously anticipated, is currently home to a golf course and a hospital, the two of which are separated by not surprisingly, the Mesa Grande Pueblo ruins.
These ruins, located near the heart downtown Mesa, were once occupied by the Hohokam Indians, responsible for constructing massive canal systems, still providing water to the Valley of the Sun, hundreds of years after the Hohokam mysteriously vanished.
The Hohokam inhabited the northern Sonora desert region known as the ‘Phoenix Basin’ for centuries before the arrival of the European explorers. They constructed extensive canals and irrigation networks, rivaling those of Ancient Egypt and China. These industrious peoples cultivated a variety of crops, including tobacco, cotton, beans, squash, maize and agave.
"INDIANA JONES, it is fair to say, would not approve. A small band of archaeologists are using Google Earth to make discoveries without getting their hands dirty. Although archaeologists have used satellite imagery for decades, the technique remained out of reach of most researchers because of the prohibitive costs and specialist skills needed to rectify distortions in raw satellite images caused by the angle of capture. But Google Earth, a free program that can be downloaded from the internet giant’s website, makes high-quality satellite images of much of the world’s surface available to anyone with a broadband connection. Archaeologists are now embracing the technology.
David Thomas, a graduate student at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, belongs to a team that launched a project called Archaeological Sites of Afghanistan in Google Earth (ASAGE) last year after plans for a survey near the Minaret of Jam had to be abandoned because of the continuing conflict in the region. He and his colleagues decided that making discoveries using computer mice, rather than shovels and trowels, would have to do instead.
“Realistically it is not possible for a Western field archaeologist to work in that area, and I can’t imagine it will be for the next 20 years,” says Mr Thomas. But, he says, studying images from Google Earth (pictured) “has the potential to enrich significantly our knowledge of Afghanistan’s archaeological remains, particularly in areas that are too large, dangerous or remote to survey from the ground.”
One aspect of the ASAGE project involved the use of high-resolution satellite images to catalogue the details of 463 previously unknown sites in the Registan desert, including mounds known as tepes (the remains of ancient settlements), hand-dug water channels and abandoned dams and reservoirs.
Little is known about the ancient history of the region, but nearby river valleys have been occupied for centuries, if not millennia. The Ghaznavids, who ruled over a large central Asian empire between the late 10th and 12th centuries, built intricate irrigation systems and established palaces, mosques and walled gardens at their winter capital of Bust and the surrounding settlements of Lashkari Bazar, on the east bank of the Helmand river."
Scientists are using advanced visualization technologies to find the hidden tomb of Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol empire.
According to legend, Genghis Khan lies buried somewhere beneath the dusty steppe of Northeastern Mongolia, entombed in a very secretive spot.
Once he was below ground, his men brought in horses to trample evidence of his grave, and just to be absolutely sure he would never be found, they diverted a river to flow over their leaders final resting place.
What Khan and his followers couldnt have envisioned was that nearly 800 years after his death, scientists at UC (University of California) San Diegos Center for Interdisciplinary Science in Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) would try to locate his tomb using advanced visualization technologies, whose origins can be traced back to the time of the Mongolian emperor himself.
As outrageous as it might sound, were looking for the tomb of Genghis Khan, Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin, an affiliated researcher for CISA3, told Science News.
There are few clues and no factual evidence about Genghis Khans burial, which is why we need to start using technology to solve this mystery, he added.
Lin and several colleagues are hoping to use advanced visualization and analytical technologies available at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) to pinpoint Khans tomb and conduct a non-invasive archaeological analysis of the area where he is believed to be buried.
Lins hope for success is based on his access to unparalleled technology at Calit2 and CISA3 to pinpoint the area where Khan might have been laid to rest, find the tomb itself and then develop a virtual recreation of it using various methods of spectral and digital imaging.
According to Lin, If you have a large burial, thats going to have an impact on the landscape. To find Khans tomb, well be using remote sensing techniques and satellite imagery to take digital pictures of the ground in the surrounding region, which well be able to display on Calit2s 287-million pixel HIPerSpace display wall.
Once weve narrowed down this region in Mongolia to a certain area, well use techniques such as ground penetrating radar, electromagnetic induction and magnetometry to produce non-destructive, non-invasive surveys, said Lin.
Well then work with people in UCSDs electrical engineering department to develop visual algorithms that will allow us to create a high-resolution, 3-D representation of the site, he added.
Lin said that hes hoping to collaborate with the Mongolian government and national universities for the project. (ANI)
A new remote sensing technology has peeled away layers of mud and rock near Peru's Cahuachi desert to reveal an ancient adobe pyramid, Italian researchers announced on Friday at a satellite imagery conference in Rome.
Nicola Masini and Rosa Lasaponara of Italy's National Research Council (CNR) discovered the pyramid by analyzing images from the satellite Quickbird, which they used to penetrate the Peruvian soil.
The researchers investigated a test area along the river Nazca. Covered by plants and grass, it was about a mile away from Cahuachi's archaeological site, which contains the remains of what is believed to be the world's biggest mud city.
Via Quickbird, Masini and colleagues collected hi-resolution infrared and multispectral images. After the researchers optimized the images with special algorithms, the result was a detailed visualization of a pyramid extending over a 9,000-square-meter area.
The discovery doesn't come as a surprise to archaeologists, since some 40 mounds at Cahuachi are believed to contain the remains of important structures.
"We know that many buildings are still buried under Cahuachi's sands, but until now, it was almost impossible to exactly locate them and detect their shape from an aerial view," Masini told Discovery News. "The biggest problem was the very low contrast between adobe, which is sun-dried earth, and the background subsoil."
Cahuachi is the best-known site of the Nazca civilization, which flourished in Peru between the first century B.C. and the fifth century A.D. and slid into oblivion by the time the Inca Empire rose to dominate the Andes.
Famous for carving in the Peruvian desert hundreds of geometric lines and images of animals and birds that are best viewed from the air, the Nazca people built Cahuachi as a ceremonial center, molding pyramids, temples and plazas from the desert itself.
There, priests led ceremonies including human sacrifices, drawing people from across the region.
Between 300 and 350 A.D., two natural disasters -- a powerful flood and a devastating earthquake -- hit Cahuachi. The site lost its sacred power to the Nazca, who then abandoned the area.
But before leaving, they sealed all monuments and buried them under the desert sand.
"Up to now, we have completely unearthed and restored a huge asymmetrical pyramid, known as the Grand Pyramid. A terraced temple and a smaller pyramid are in an advanced state of excavation," Giuseppe Orefici, an archaeologist who has spent decades excavating Cahuachi and has also worked with the CNR researchers, wrote in the conference paper.
Featuring a 300-by-328-foot base, the newly discovered pyramid consists of at least "four degrading terraces which suggest a truncated pyramid similar to the Grand Pyramid." With seven levels, this imposing monument was sculpted from the landscape and enhanced by large adobe walls.
"This is an interesting finding. As with the Grand Pyramid, it is likely that also this pyramid contains the remains of human sacrifices," Andrea Drusini, an anthropologist at Padova University, told Discovery News.
In previous excavations at Cahuachi, Drusini found some 20 severed "offering heads" at various locations inside the Grand Pyramid.
"They have circular holes cut into the forehead and were perfectly prepared from an anatomical point of view," Drusini said.
The researchers are now investigating other buried structures next to the newly discovered pyramid.
"This innovative technology opens up new perspectives for the detection of buried adobe monuments in Cahuachi and elsewhere," said Masini. "Once we have more information about the size and shape of the structures, we might turn to virtual archaeology to bring the pyramid and its nearby structures back to life."
"Self-induced drought and climate change may have caused the destruction of the Maya civilization, say scientists working with new satellite technology that monitors Central America's environment.
Researchers from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, launched the satellite program, known as SERVIR, in early 2005 to help combat wildfires, improve land use, and assist with natural disaster responses.
The researchers occasionally refer to the project as environmental diplomacy.
But the program also found traces of the Maya's hidden, possibly disastrous agricultural past—and is now using those lessons to help ensure that today's civilizations fare better in the face of modern-day climate change.
SERVIR stands to warn leaders in Central and South America where climate change might deliver the hardest hits to their ecosystems and biodiversity, say developers Tom Sever and Daniel Irwin.
If the governments heed the warnings, the data may truly save lives, the experts add.
Secret Farms
More than a hundred reasons have been proposed for the downfall of the Maya, among them hurricanes, overpopulation, disease, warfare, and peasant revolt. (Read "Maya Rise and Fall" in National Geographic magazine (August 2007).
But Sever, NASA's only archaeologist, adds to evidence for another explanation.
"Our recent research shows that another factor may have been climate change," he said during a meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month.
One conventional theory has it that the Maya relied on slash-and-burn agriculture. But Sever and his colleagues say such methods couldn't have sustained a population that reached 60,000 at its peak.
The researchers think the Maya also exploited seasonal wetlands called bajos, which make up more than 40 percent of the Petén landscape that the ancient empire called home. "
This story reminds me of the countless circular and rectangular features around Florida, the Straights of Florida, the Florida Keys, The Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, Texas, California and the Caribbean.
The discovery of the ancient city of Akroteri on the island of Santorini was made by a local landowner who noticed numerous circular sink holes on his land. One day while inspecting his land, he fell into one of the sink holes and discovered the lost city of Akroteri below.
"Madrid - Where was the capital of Tartessos, the legendary pre-Roman civilization which once existed on the Iberian Peninsula?
The culture which flourished from around 800 to 500 BC is believed to have been located mainly around the present-day cities of Cadiz, Seville and Huelva in southern Spain, but no traces of a major urban settlement have been found.
Now, however, scientists have discovered surprising clues to where a major Tartessian city may have been, the daily El Pais reported.
Its ruins could lie in the subsoil of a marsh area known as the Marisma de Hinojos in the Donana National Park near Seville, according to the daily.
Chief researcher Sebastian Celestino declined to comment on the report. His team will give details once the investigation is finished, a representative of the Superior Council of Scientific Investigations (CSIC) told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
For years, satellite and aerial images of the Marisma de Hinojos have revealed strange circular structures of different sizes - up to 200 metres in diameter - and rectangular forms.
The area is under water in wintertime, and until now, scientists had thought it had always been inundated.
That had made most of them skeptical of the possibility that the forms visible from the air could be remains of a human settlement buried in the subsoil.
Yet new evidence has now emerged, with electro-magnetic tests indicating that the area may have experienced long dry periods, according to El Pais."
For hundreds of years, the people who lived near the violent Arenal volcano in Costa Rica followed the same pathway, straight through the forest from their village to their cemetery, over and over again.
Beginning more than 2,500 years ago, the footprints of those early sojourners slowly carved a rut into the soil.
Now, all these years later, scientists are puzzled and amazed by an ancient pathway, long buried by volcanic ash and vegetation that has resurfaced again in satellite images from space.
Anthropologist Payson Sheets of the University of Colorado is on his way back to Costa Rica, along with a team of researchers, to see if the latest in satellite technology can help unravel the story of these ancient people.
"We've got a heck of a mystery here," says Sheets.
Finding Straight Lines
Part of the mystery involves how the pathways were discovered. They are almost impossible to detect from the ground, because years of growth and erosion have made them blend in with the surrounding area. But they show up clearly from space because the paths follow straight lines.
Nature abhors a straight line, and images from a NASA aircraft first made in 1984 intrigued Sheets and NASA archaeologist Tom Sever because a straight line is nearly always a clear indication of human activities. They traveled to the area and found that the line was indeed a pathway, but the images were few and far between and didn't show much of the area.
That changed last year with the launch of a commercial satellite, known as IKONOS. The IKONOS satellite took images of the footpaths in the visual and infrared portions of the light spectrum.
Future satellites could have archaeological missions
Scientists had previously suspected that certain types of imaging system could look beneath the surface of the Earth under some circumstances, but no-one had the proof. Dan Blumberg and Julian Daniels, of the Ben Gurion University, told New Scientist magazine how they were able to detect flat squares of aluminium which they had buried at different depths in the sand of the Negev desert. The pair used radar sensors on board an aircraft.
"Now we have systematic proof. Buried objects can be detected from airborne systems," Dr Blumberg said.
Desert and ice
Images from US space shuttle missions in the 1980s appeared to show ancient river drainage patterns beneath the Sahara desert.
Satellites have revealed ancient river beds beneath the Sahara
Subsequent imaging turned up ring structures beneath the ice of Antarctica. But until now no-one has been entirely sure that these images definitely showed real objects. The Israeli pair used P-band microwave sensors. These penetrate farther underground that other microwave sensors offering better resolution. Dr Blumberg said he hoped P-band sensors could be added to satellite sensor packages.
Wet and dry
He said the imaging technique might be used to find fossils, geographic structures, underground buildings and pipes and perhaps even mass graves. The principal drawback seems to be that the technique only works on very dry ground, because liquid water absorbs microwave radiation. But, as Dr Blumberg said, that still left 15% of the Earth's surface dry enough to work on. The Negev experiment used aluminium plates buried up to 40 centimetres beneath the sand but working systems might be able to penetrate up to nine metres into the Earth.
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