Spying on the Past: Declassified Intelligence Satellite Photographs and Near Eastern Landscapes

While attempting to document Soviet nuclear capacities, the first generation of American intelligence satellites also captured vivid images of archaeological sites and landscapes across the Near East. Since their declassification, archaeologists have eagerly exploited them to investigate early cities, trackways, and irrigation systems. In many cases, forty years of development and modernization has damaged or destroyed these sites and features, leaving the satellite photographs as the best surviving record. This paper reviews case studies from Syria, Iraq, and Iran.Anthropolog

CORONA Satellite Photography and Ancient Road Networks: A Northern Mesopotamian Case Study

Landscape archaeology has emphasised the role of the entire landscape in ancient life, rather than putting an exclusive focus on those loci of intensive behaviour we call “sites.” The broader area of interest requires a corresponding reduction in intensity, the difference between digging a 100 m2 trench and surveying a 200 km2 region. In order to study entire regions efficiently, landscape archaeologists have normally turned to remote sensing data sources. In the Middle East, aerial photographs have been difficult to obtain, so these sources have generally been limited to low resolution SPOT and LANDSAT imagery, which are sufficient for geomorphological studies but too coarse to detect most archaeological landscape features. Archaeologists working in the Middle East are now beginning to take advantage of a newly available resource, the declassified CORONA satellite program, which combines the large coverage of the modern low resolution satellites with the high resolution of aerial photography. In this case study, I have used CORONA photographs to identify and map ancient road systems in north-eastern Syria (Figure 1).Anthropolog

Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamia

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptations to meet the goals of elite members of society, or society as a whole. This study proposes an alternative model. By reviewing indigenous terminology from later historical periods, it proposes that urbanism evolved in the context of a metaphorical extension of the household that represented a creative transformation of a familiar structure. The first cities were unintended consequences of this transformation, which may seem “revolutionary” to archaeologists but did not to their inhabitants. This alternative model calls into question the applicability of terms like “urbanism” and “the state” for early Mesopotamian society.Anthropolog

The Morphology of Neo-Assyrian Cities

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Pastoral Nomads of the Second and Third Millennia AD on the Upper Tigris River, Turkey: Archaeological Evidence from the Hirbemerdon Tepe Survey

The importance of non-sedentary pastoralist groups in the social and political history of Mesopotamia has long been appreciated from the perspective of ancient texts and ethnohistorical sources, but empirical evidence from archaeology has been lacking. In two field seasons, the Hirbemerdon Tepe Survey (HMTS) in Diyarbakır province, SE Turkey, has recovered a variety of sites and landscape features associated with pastoral nomadic occupation during the last two millennia and possibly earlier. In doing so, we targeted non-alluvial areas where feature preservation was likely, and employed pedestrian survey methods more typical of Mediterranean fieldwork. If Mesopotamian archaeology is to investigate the landscapes of pastoral nomads, it must incorporate intensive survey methods and expand coverage beyond alluvial environments.Anthropolog

Formation and Destruction of Pastoral and Irrigation Landscapes on the Mughan Steppe, North-Western Iran

CORONA satellite photography taken in the 1960s continues to reveal buried ancient landscapes and sequences of landscapes – some of them no longer visible. In this new survey of the Mughan Steppe in north-western Iran, the authors map a ‘signature landscape’ belonging to Sasanian irrigators, and discover that the traces of the nomadic peoples that succeeded them also show up on CORONA – in the form of scoops for animal shelters. The remains of these highly significant pastoralists have been virtually obliterated since the CORONA surveys by a new wave of irrigation farming. Such archaeological evaluation of a landscape has grave implications for the heritage of grassland nomads and the appreciation of their impact on history.Anthropolog

The Architecture and Pottery of a Late 3rd Millennium BC Residential Quarter at Tell Hamoukar, Northeastern Syria

The 2001 excavations in Area H on Hamoukar’s lower town produced a wealth of information on a residential neighbourhood of a late third-millennium BC city. The excavations were intended to address several issues, including chronology, urban form and the final abandonment of the site. Toward these ends, a broad exposure of over 400 $m^2$ was opened, revealing a prosperous neighbourhood that had been sacked and abruptly abandoned. This report addresses two aspects, its architecture and ceramic assemblage, in detail. The architecture demonstrates broadly shared principles in spatial patterning and planning, as well as similarities in construction, with variations connected to socioeconomic status. The ceramics represent a snapshot of the assemblage of the late or post-Akkadian period, including many whole or reconstructable forms. Contrary to the expectations of abrupt climatic change models, Hamoukar remained settled and urbanised after the proposed 2200 BC Akkadian collapse, and its abandonment was the result of a sudden and violent military event.Anthropolog

Multitemporal Fusion for the Detection of Static Spatial Patterns in Multispectral Satellite Images--with Application to Archaeological Survey

We evaluate and further develop a multitemporal fusion strategy that we use to detect the location of ancient settlement sites in the Near East and to map their distribution, a spatial pattern that remains static over time. For each ASTER images that has been acquired in our survey area in north-eastern Syria, we use a pattern classification strategy to map locations with a multispectral signal similar to the one from (few) known archaeological sites nearby. We obtain maps indicating the presence of anthrosol – soils that formed in the location of ancient settlements and that have a distinct spectral pattern under certain environmental conditions – and find that pooling the probability maps from all available time points reduces the variance of the spatial anthrosol pattern significantly. Removing biased classification maps – i.e. those that rank last when comparing the probability maps with the (limited) ground truth we have – reduces the overall prediction error even further, and we estimate optimal weights for each image using a non-negative least squares regression strategy. The ranking and pooling strategy approach we propose in this study shows a significant improvement over the plain averaging of anthrosol probability maps that we used in an earlier attempt to map archaeological sites in a 20,000 km2 area in northern Mesopotamia, and we expect it to work well in other surveying tasks that aim at mapping static surface patterns with limited ground truth in long series of multispectral images.Anthropolog

Cycles of Civilization in Northern Mesopotamia, 4400-2000 BC

The intensification of fieldwork in northern Mesopotamia, the upper region of the Tigris-Euphrates basin, has revealed two cycles of expansion and reduction in social complexity between 4400-2000 BC. These cycles include developments in social inequality, political centralization, craft production and economic specialization, agropastoral land use, and urbanization. Contrary to earlier assessments, many of these developments proceeded independently from the polities in southern Mesopotamia, although not in isolation. This review considers recent data from excavations and surveys in northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey with particular attention to how they are used to construct models of early urban polities.Anthropolog