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

::: Maya May Have Caused Civilization-Ending Climate Change

"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. "

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::: Search for Legendary city of Tartessos in Marsh, Satellite Images Reveal Strange Circular Structures

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. 

Google Earth Link

"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."

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::: Satellite Imagery Locates Prehistoric Paths

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.

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::: Satellites could spot ancient remains

My only question, what are we waiting for?

Satellites really could be used to spot ancient archaeological treasures buried underground, two researchers in Israel have shown.

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.

 

::: Is field the site of 2,000-year-old lost city?

Aug 15 2006 Gerry Holt, South Wales Echo

A 2,000-year-old city - one of the most important sites in British history - is believed to have been uncovered in South Wales. According to experts from the Ancient British Historical Association (ABHA), a field at Mynydd y Gaer, near Pencoed, is the fabled fortress city of King Caradoc I, or Caractacus, who fought the Romans between 42 and 51 AD. Historians Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett used old manuscripts to narrow their field of search and aerial photos from the Google Earth website, which provides detailed maps and satellite imagery, to find the exact spot. Their findings have yet to be verified, but the team are now positive they have found the long-lost site. Mr Wilson said: 'What we have is a clearly-defined walled city in exactly the place the records tell us it should be.

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::: Japanese researchers find new giant picture on Peru's Nazca Plateau

A new giant picture on the Nazca Plateau in Peru, which is famous for giant patterns that can be seen from the air, has been discovered by a team of Japanese researchers.

The image is 65 meters long, and appears to be an animal with horns. It is thought to have been drawn as a symbol of hopes for good crops, but there are no similar patterns elsewhere, and the type of the animal remains unclear.

The discovery marks the first time since the 1980s that a picture other than a geometrical pattern has been found on the Nazca Plateau.

The picture was found by a team of researchers including Masato Sakai, an associate professor at Yamagata University, after they analyzed images from a U.S. commercial satellite. They confirmed it was a previously undiscovered picture in a local survey in March this year. It is located at the south of the Nazca Plateau, and apparently went undiscovered since few tourist planes pass over the area.

There is evidence that vehicles had driven in the area, and part of the picture is destroyed.

Two parts of the picture, that appear to be horns, bear close resemblance to those that appear on earthenware dating from 100 B.C. to A.D. 600, during the time when the Nazca kingdom flourished, and it is thought that they relate to fertility rites.

The research team will use images from the advanced land-observing satellite "Daichi," which was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in January this year, to create a distribution map of images on the earth that can be seen from the air.

"We want to identify all the images, and work to preserve earth pictures that are gradually being destroyed," Sakai said. (Mainichi)

STORY LINK

 

::: Ancient Canals in Assyrian capital of Nineveh

Ur takes a step back to see ancient networks
By Alvin Powell
Harvard News Office

"The view from space of an ancient canal network is recasting archaeologists' understanding of the Assyrian capital of Nineveh and of the farming economy that supported it at its height of power almost 3,000 years ago.

The work of Assistant Anthropology Professor Jason Ur, detailed in the November/December issue of the archaeology journal Iraq, is casting doubt on the long-held belief that canals that brought water from springs and rivers far to Nineveh's north were mainly constructed to support the city's elaborate gardens.

Using declassified satellite photographs taken decades ago, Ur found what he believes is evidence of branches in the canals that indicate extensive agricultural irrigation in the lands north of Nineveh that scholars had thought dependent on rainfall for their annual production.

With irrigation, those fields would have been potentially far more productive than if they had been reliant on the vagaries of natural rain. Ur said the canals indicate that the farming system underlying what was then the Middle East's dominant empire was more complex and organized than previously thought.

There were likely smaller satellite cities in the areas where the canals branched, Ur said, some of which remain undiscovered or buried under modern villages.

"What I would guess is that there are undiscovered population centers there," Ur said. "The irrigation infrastructure is there to support larger settlements. We have to go and find them."

Satellite photographs can be powerful tools for archaeologists in detecting broader patterns of settlement and networks that accompany ancient civilizations, such as roads and canals, Ur said.

An archaeologist trying to piece together these great works can walk the ground, digging to examine a promising mound here or an outcropping there. It helps, however, to step back from the landscape and look for patterns and structures that may be difficult or impossible to detect from the ground, where thousands of years of farming, road building, and urban development obscure all but bits and pieces.

"If you press your nose against a Monet, all you see is a blur. If you take a few steps back, you see lilies, you see bridges," said Ur. "For this reason, remote sensing data is really irreplaceable."

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::: New Search for Noah's Ark Begins

Digital image of 'Ararat Anomaly' has researchers taking closer look
By Joe Kovacs

"A new, high-resolution digital image of what has become known as the "Ararat Anomaly" is reigniting interest in the hunt for Noah's Ark.

The location of the anomaly on the northwest corner of Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey has been under investigation from afar by ark hunters for years, but it has remained unexplored, with the government of Turkey not granting any scientific expedition permission to explore on site.

But the detail revealed by the new photo from DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite has a man at the helm of the probe excited once again.

"I've got new found optimism ... as far as my continuing push to have the intelligence community declassify some of the more definitive-type imagery," Porcher Taylor, an associate professor in paralegal studies at the University of Richmond, told Space.com.

For more than three decades, Taylor has been a national security analyst, and has also served as a senior associate for five years at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

"I'm calling this my satellite archaeology project," Taylor said."

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::: NASA, UNH Scientists Uncover Lost Maya Ruins – from Space

Good to see more progress is happening with satellite archaeology!

"Remains of the ancient Maya culture, mysteriously destroyed at the height of its reign in the ninth century, have been hidden in the rainforests of Central America for more than 1,000 years. Now, NASA and University of New Hampshire scientists are using space- and aircraft-based "remote-sensing" technology to uncover those ruins, using the chemical signature of the civilization's ancient building materials.

NASA archaeologist Tom Sever and scientist Dan Irwin, both from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., are teaming with William Saturno, an archaeologist at the University of New Hampshire, to locate the ruins of the ancient culture. Saturno discovered the oldest known intact Maya mural at the site in 2001.

“From the air, everything but the tops of very few surviving pyramids are hidden by the tree canopy," said Sever, widely recognized for two decades as a pioneer in the use of aerospace remote-sensing for archaeology. "On the ground, the 60- to 100-foot trees and dense undergrowth can obscure objects as close as 10 feet away. Explorers can stumble right through an ancient city that once housed thousands – and never even realize it.”

Sever has explored the capacity of remote sensing technology and the science of collecting information about the Earth’s surface using aerial or space-based photography to serve archeology. He and Irwin provided Saturno with high-resolution commercial satellite images of the rainforest, and collected data from NASA’s Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar, an instrument flown aboard a high-altitude weather plane, capable of penetrating clouds, snow and forest canopies.

These resulting Earth observations have helped the team survey an uncharted region around San Bartolo, Guatemala. They discovered a correlation between the color and reflectivity of the vegetation seen in the images – their "signature," which is captured by instruments measuring light in the visible and near-infrared spectrums – and the location of known archaeological sites."

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::: Ancient lakes of the Sahara

The Sahara has not always been the arid, inhospitable place that it is today – it was once a savannah teeming with life, according to researchers at the Universities of Reading and Leicester.
News Link

Eight years of studies in the Libyan desert area of Fazzan, now one of the harshest, most inaccessible spots on Earth, have revealed swings in its climate that have caused considerably wetter periods, lasting for thousands of years, when the desert turned to savannah and lakes provided water for people and animals.

This, in turn, has given us vital clues about the history of humans in the area and how these ancient inhabitants coped with climate change as the land began to dry up around them again.

In their article ‘Ancient lakes of the Sahara’, which appears in the January-February issue of American Scientist magazine, Dr Kevin White of the University of Reading and Professor David Mattingly of the University of Leicester explain how they used satellite technology and archaeological evidence to reveal new clues about both the past environment of the Sahara and of human prehistory in the area.

“The climate of the Sahara has been highly variable over the millennia and we have been able to provide much more specific dating of these changes,” said Dr White. “Over the last 10,000 years, there have been two distinct humid phases, separated by an interval of highly variable but generally drying conditions between roughly 8,000 and 7,000 years ago. Another drying trend took place after about 5,000 years ago, leading to today’s parched environment.”

The researchers determined where surface water was once present by using radar images of the desert taken from space. These images showed rivers, lakes and springs now buried below shifting sand dunes. As these bodies dried out thousands of years ago, the resulting mineral deposits cemented the lake sediments together and these hardened layers are detectable by using radar images.

“This information was essential because archaeologists need to focus their efforts near ancient rivers, lakes and springs, where people used to congregate due to their basic need for water,” said Dr White. “We found large quantities of stone tools around the ancient water sources, indicating at least two separate phases of human occupation.”

The earliest humans in the area were Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, who lived in the Fazzan between about 400,000 and 70,000 years ago. They survived by hunting large and small game in a landscape that was considerably wetter and greener than it is now. A prolonged arid phase from about 70,000 to 12,000 years ago apparently drove humans out of the region, but then the rains returned – along with the people.

Around 5,000 years ago the climate began to dry out again, but this time people adapted by developing an agricultural civilization with towns and villages based around oases. This process culminated with the emergence of the Garamantian society in the first millennium BC.

Professor Mattingly said: “We have been given a completely new view of this elusive and remarkable society. The Garamantes were known to the ancient Romans as a race of desert warriors, but archaeology has shown they had agriculture, cities and a phenomenally advanced system of water extraction that kept their civilisation going for 1,000 years as the land was drying up around them.”

They cultivated a variety of high-grade cereals, such as wheat and barley, and other crops such as date palms, vines, olives, cotton, vegetables and pulses.

As the Saharan climate began to dry out they drew their water from a large subterranean aquifer (an underground bed of rock that yields water) and transported it through a network of tunnels.

“The fact that the Garamantes developed this ingenious irrigation system shows that our ability to apply engineering solutions to deal with climate change is by no means only a modern phenomenon,” said Dr White. “The gradual drying up of springs and dessication of the surrounding landscape must have seemed ominous , but they knew they had to develop sophisticated methods to cope with it.

“But even this remarkably adaptable society – one of the first urban civilisations built in a desert – could not cope forever with a falling water table and intensifying aridity. Sometime around 500AD, the Garamantian society collapsed and their irrigation system fell into disuse.”