Artaxerxes III, a Persian “great warrior” – in the words of Herodotus – made his way in 343 BC along a tributary of the Nile in a southwesterly direction to the rich Egyptian city of Ro-nefer (‘the beautiful mouth’) , famous for its treasures of gold, lapis lazuli and wine from the Greek islands. This was the latest in a long series of attacks that the Persian monarch had unleashed without success against a pharaonic Egypt already in decline but still powerful. This time, he would finally achieve his objectives after assembling a large fleet and an army of more than 300,000 men. Ro-nefer would be completely destroyed that morning. To the point that the site of that great city is today a brown mound that the locals call Tell Tebilla where a small village stands and where archaeologists have been working for a century without great finds … until help came from heaven.
No, it was not divinity in any of its imaginable incarnations that helped archaeologists like the University of Alabama professor Sarah Parcak to come up with an unexpected discovery on the ground in the summer of 2003, but some photographs taken from space 40 years ago within the framework of a secret program of the United States Government in the middle of the Cold War. Those satellite images allowed those archaeologists to finally discover the remains of the imposing adobe wall that had surrounded the ill-fated city. But, in addition, his contact with other more recent satellite images offered something else: the knowledge of the already dried river branches that in the past had served as privileged routes for the invasion.
“Today,” says archaeologist, Indiana Jones fan and author of ‘Archeology from space: a revolutionary way of approaching our past’ (Ariel, 2021), “Thanks to the vast development of satellite technology, discoveries are being made at an ever faster rate, over ever greater stretches and in places we never thought possible. There Out there thousands of hidden stories that tell us about how the civilizations of the past thrived, collapsed and then were reborn. “In his book, which has just arrived in Spanish bookstores translated by Beatriz Ruiz Jara, Parcak records all the wonders that the still very young discipline of space archeology has offered so far and warns of those to come.
What can we see?
Using data and images taken from the air or space in order to locate extinct rivers or hidden sites, as space archeology does, is a complex task halfway between science and art. Learning the language of so-called remote sensing requires a precise knowledge of the nature of light and its incidence on different types of terrain, advanced notions of chemistry and materials, mathematics of algorithms and, also, common sense to interpret the results acquired about 300 kilometers above the International Space Station.
“People think,” Parcak explains, “that remote sensing work is plagued with ‘aha’ moments, that moment when, with the push of a button, all the secrets will be revealed before your eyes. It is not like this. The typical remote sensing specialist spends hours a week in front of a computer screen, cursing every so often because the program has crashed. When something does work, the outbursts multiply because you have forgotten to record the exact steps you have taken until you reach that point. And you have to start over. It’s about learning, about fine-tuning the procedure“.
Thousands of deposits were found under the Amazon jungle in which more than a million people could have lived in now inhospitable areas
And yet, the author admits, the aha moments exist and the findings obtained by space archeology pile up, surprising, faster and faster. One of the most recent has been the incredible discovery of thousands of pre-Columbian sites hidden under the Amazon jungle in which between 1250 and 1500 more than a million people could have lived in areas that today seem clearly inhospitable. Another was the first application in 2008 of a new laser imaging technology called ‘lidar’ that changed Mesoamerican archeology forever by uncovering more ancient Mayan sites at once than in all of previous history. Yet another was the spectacular discovery in 2017 of the lost city of Qalatga Darband in Iraqi Kurdistan, and in whose vicinity it took place. the decisive battle between Alexander the Great and Darius III.
A crucial issue and perhaps less obvious than the announcements of colorful discoveries is that space archeology mitigates the fearsome damage that all excavation by the very fact of being causes in the remains that it comes across. Parcak concludes: “We stake nothing less than the sum total of human history and knowledge. To limit unnecessary destruction during excavation, and to keep our work on schedule and on budget, we excavate with maximum focus. Used properly, space archeology can give us a pretty good idea of the structures or elements that are in the site, or at least just below the first layer. ”
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