Spotting ancient sites, from space

Satellites Expose 8,000 Years of Lost Civilization
by Virginia Gewin
Nature mag
Monday, March 19, 2012
Hidden in the landscape of the fertile crescent of the Middle East, scientists say, lurk overlooked networks of small settlements that hold vital clues to ancient civilizations.

Beyond the impressive mounds of earth, known as tells in Arabic, that mark lost cities, researchers have found a way to give archaeologists a broader perspective of the ancient landscape. By combining spy-satellite photos obtained in the 1960s with modern multispectral images and digital maps of Earth's surface, the researchers have created a new method for mapping large-scale patterns of human settlement. The approach, used to map some 14,000 settlement sites spanning eight millennia in 23,000 square kilometers of northeastern Syria, is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Here are some pictures.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/slideshow/2012/03/27/earth-from-above-astronauts-photograph-our-planet/#slide=1


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Someone could use Google Earth to map all of the important archaeological sites from Earth and stuff. It’d be an interesting project.

One of those sidebars is about someone who did just that. :’)

Thanks!

cool.

There is a group online detailing all the sites in North Korea too. It’s very interesting.

Are they looking for anything in particular?

The most interesting stuff is probably under water.....

There is a lot of evidence that various places on the earth have remains of previous habitation.

Yep. There sure is.

Good in theory, otherwise very, very, very tiring work.

I've spent several months off and on using google.com to go back and forth across the country from South to North to find every single city, town, village or abandoned encampment laid out in accordance with the Spanish Law of the Indies.

A secret for you ~ there ain't many of them ~ but there's a cluster in Southern Indiana, and maybe even a La Villa Real!

With few exceptions there was No Spanish activity North of the Ohio East of the Mississippi AFTER 1604 ~ so this is all 1500s stuff in that part of the country ~ a full blown Secret History where everything you are going to find out about it is in the Prado or the Vatican.

I think it's worth continuing since this may attract the interest of some of the local or state historical societies.

New Jersey appears to have DOZENS OF these places along the shore in the South, but they require far more analysis. That area has been repeatedly resettled! My current hypothesis is this area is the site of a previously unrecognized settlements by folks from THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS ~ after 1621 they'd just disappear into the mix of peoples coming to America. The Jamestown scribes may have recorded something about this when they referred to land to the North having 20,000 European settlers (which could mean what we know today as Maryland).

What these guys are digging up may be helpful.

If a large group of vilunteers, archaeologists, students and interested people did it like a wiki project I think it could work.

I've found signs of an underlying survey that had to have been done for most of North America EAST of the Rockies ~ this is long before the Brits took over Canada.

There are definitely some Spanish town sites at the intersections of primary lines of longitude and latitude ~ with the sort of error in longitude you'd find before the development of really great watches ~ even found signs of some surveying being done with magnetic compass (always a loser BTW)

Might be possible to organize something like SETI. Or, call it Search For Ancient Hombres

About the Law of the Indies, South America and Mexico have a great number of towns laid out according to the Spanish law for a new settlement, so there's little doubt about what you're looking at when you find it.

In what is now the United States and Canada early settlers have pretty much done their own idiosyncratic layouts, so the Spanish towns STAND OUT ~ although there are some French towns that can cloud the issue.

Thanks all, and g’night for now.

I've spent several months off and on using google.com to go back and forth across the country from South to North to find every single city, town, village or abandoned encampment laid out in accordance with the Spanish Law of the Indies.

Do you have a link to the "layout" portion of the laws? I can't find one.

A secret for you ~ there ain't many of them ~ but there's a cluster in Southern Indiana, and maybe even a La Villa Real!

Which ones in Southern Indiana? Would be a good day trip for the child.

cool! How do you do that? I live in NJ and the shore area history is facinating. I’ve read books about it. Love it down there.

OK, good place to start to find a La Villa Real is Santa Fe New Mexico. That's a royal town. The oldest part of town is not oriented DUE NORTH but more WEST BY NORTHWEST. You can see the original town plaza in the downtown area, and there other plazas that still exist within the grid.

For a variation look at Seymour, Indiana. The oldest part of town (Look at the Shields Park area) is oriented NORTH BY NORTHWEST.

Sometimes in these old railroad towns (this has two railroads cutting through) you may find similar orientation for the grid but that part of Seymour was in place as Mule's Crossing long before the railroad came through. Mule probably means Reindeer in Northern Sa'ami. That area is also called Renno, or Reindeer in Spanish, and due South is a separate similarly laid out area known today as Cowtown.

As is typical with most of the towns between Columbus Indiana and Louisville Kentucky they were established on top of trading locations that were present in French times (1700 to 1754), and probably in the 1500/1600 period by Spanish traders or miners.

The first railroad West of the Alleghenies was built through this region from roughly what is today Madison, Indiana to North Vernon, Indiana. South of Seymour you will find Henryville, recently wiped out in a tornado. It too, is laid out NORTH by Northwest, and the surrounding area of Clark's Grant (George Roger's Clark's reward from Congress) is laid out similarly.

That was a very popular area for settlement right from the beginning since it had been "surveyed' to a greater degree than even KENTUCKY to the South (entered as a state in 1790).

THERE are a number of other places East and West of that area laid out in the same way.

Remember, without roads ~ just horse trails or old Indian paths ~ your town would disappear if folks couldn't find it. That seems to have been what happened to these places. They got laid out. Someone built a small fort or stockade area around the plaza, and traders and miners moved in and out. In 1604 Spain withdrew from much of the East and left the Great Lakes to the French. These older towns languished for another couple of centuries, but the next settlers in left the layouts in place. I"ve found some where they left the curved corners of the stockades in place!

For a number of towns I've found that the first people to come forward and claim a land patent under the new American government had Spanish surnames.

So, how do you search for them? Well, you go to a town ~ e.g. NASHVILLE TN. You move in to where you can see the street patterns. You blow up the map on the screen. You move left or right, as far as you can ~ remembering that the Mississippi was the border between Spain and British North America, or French North America for two centuries! THAT IS A LONG TIME!

Once you get all the way left and right you move NOrth or South 10 miles or so and begin again. Every time you see a town oriented that way, possibly with a still intact plaza, you find out the GPS coordinates and write them down next to the town name.

Then you look for another one.

Now, cockeyed French towns ~ they are NOT Spanish towns but they are oriented to something ~ usually to a nearby river running through downtown. The French always went to a river and gave everybody some frontage and set up very deep lots for farming. That way they could all raise crops and cattle while living in a strip village.

The French disappeared into the American mix. Their town layouts had a different inspiration and are only coincidentally oriented other than straight N/S. In Europe French towns have precise orientations ~ because they could do that having dug wells earlier. In America no one had a well so everyone had to have access to the rivers and streams in the area.

The Spanish were less concerned with water having a cultural standard suitable for arid lands.

Eventually the Spanish disappeared into the mix.

Some Midwestern and Eastern town histories reflect previous Spanish settlement or mining interests. West of the Mississippi that's common.

I have not checked from Kentucky South to the Gulf Coast ~ (with a few exceptions of towns I wanted to look at in Georgia, and lo and behold, there are some obvious Spanish layouts there).

Is the north by northwest orientation due to magnetic pole location?

Depending on your latitude you can orient a building to MAXIMIZE SOLAR GAIN or MINIMIZE SOLAR GAIN. You can simplify the job by orienting your primary roadways so that all the houses are optimally placed.

A smart designer also takes a look at prevailing winds, average number of days it's below freezing, average number when it rains, the percentage overcast, and so forth.

The Spanish and others living on the West Coast of Europe figured out some rules of thumb to make the job even easier for town planners. The Chinese incorporated very similar rules in their Feng Shui.

The handful of attempts at laying out principal meridians I've found aren't all that long ~ few hundred miles. They also occur in the parts of the US that we know were the earliest to be penetrated by the Spanish. It's like they were started by folks unaware of how much deviation there was to magnetic North in North America.