U-2 Spy Plane Images Reveal Hidden Ancient Landscapes

U-2 Spy Plane Images Reveal Ancient Landscapes

OVER THE COURSE OF FOUR YEARS, working over a light table in a darkened room in the National Archives, landscape archaeologist Emily Hammer, Assistant Professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Price Lab for the Digital Humanities, and Jason Ur, C94, Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, created an invaluable resource offering scholars a window into ancient sites as well as Middle Eastern communities as they existed more than half a century ago.

In a series of trips to the National Archives, they painstakingly examined thousands of high-resolution images captured for U.S. military intelligence from U-2 spy planes during the 1950s and ’60s. Engineered to be lightweight, U-2 planes flew at around 70,000 feet over Cold War hot spots throughout Europe and Asia, capturing places of military interest such as foreign bases, airfields, and potential weapons facilities, but also capturing—at high resolution that could show details as small as a person—historical, ethnographic, and archaeological sites and landscapes.

Many of these U-2 images were declassified by the U.S. government in 1997, but they were unindexed and unscanned, so researchers were unable to access them digitally or to know where each roll of film was taken.

Ur (Tell al-Muqayyar) was one of the earliest and longest-lived ancient cities in southern Iraq. The main settlement mounds of Ur were once surrounded by a city wall that enclosed an area of 50-60 hectares. Soil discoloration and mounding visible in U2 photographs suggest that the city was originally much larger than this and incorporated several suburbs.

Analyzing them posed a daunting task but offered Drs. Hammer and Ur a high-resolution aerial overview of their areas of research across the Middle East from 60 years ago—before urban expansion, development, agricultural intensification, or political actions wiped away surface traces of ancient communities that had survived for millennia.

To accurately reconstruct the path of the missions, they examined rolls of “tracking film” from the U-2 planes and matched it to modern satellite imagery. Unlike the main camera system, which offered highresolution images over stretches of the flight where it was activated by the pilot, tracking frames show lowresolution, horizon-to-horizon views under the plane throughout the entire flight, offering researchers a much broader view and making it easier to recognize ground features. This, in turn made it possible to figure out which locales might have intersected the plane’s flight path and its main camera’ photographic swath.

To use the detailed main camera images for their research, they unspooled hundreds of meters of film over a light table, identified frames from sites already known to be of archaeological interest, photographed the negatives in pieces using a 100-mm macro lens, and then stitched them together and inverted them in Photoshop. Because the lens from a plane or satellite never has a perfectly vertical perspective, they georeferenced each frame in digital mapping software to geometrically correct it and give it real-world coordinates, creating an image they could use to map the place that it covers.

Dr. Hammer admits that the archives work was sometimes cumbersome but notes that it was prevented from becoming tedious because the images were so interesting and sometimes beautiful. In the first roll she examined in 2015, she was stunned by the clarity of images taken over the black basalt desert of eastern Jordan. These images showed enclosures connected to long stone lines, marking ancient gazelle hunting traps called “desert kites,” as well as mysterious circular stone structures resembling spoked wheels, and clusters of dwelling foundations or animal corrals—evidence of much early human activity in a region that is sparsely inhabited today. In 2019, she and Dr. Ur published an online, interactive guide for U-2 images of the Middle East as well as a how-to guide for reproducing and working with the images, enabling other anthropologists and historians to search the U-2 photo archives for images relevant to their own research projects. They note that for broader audiences, the photos provide a fascinating historical look at the Middle East, showing, for example, Old Aleppo before the massive destruction wrought in the Syrian Civil War.

Visitors to the Penn Museum can now enjoy a

ON VIEW

U-2 SPY PLANES & AERIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

The exhibition is on view in the Lower Level Special Exhibitions Gallery through Fall 2023.

On September 15, Penn Museum members heard from Curator Emily Hammer about her research identifying images captured by U-2 spy planes over archaeological sites in the Middle East, and had a chance to explore the exhibition.

selection of these fascinating photos in the special exhibition U-2 Spy Planes & Aerial Archaeology, curated by Dr. Hammer, which opened in August 2022. Through approximately 15 large-scale printed photographs that include sites and a selection of related objects from the Museum’s collections, the exhibition highlights new archaeological and historical evidence gathered from U-2 photographs in each of three case studies: 1) the kite-shaped gazelle hunting traps in eastern Jordan that fascinated Dr. Hammer in her first review of the film rolls; 2) the watercourses and suburbs of the early Mesopotamian city of Ur and its magnificent ziggurat; and 3) the marsh villages in southern Iraq. This last case study is ethnographic rather than archaeological, documenting a 1950s way of life that no longer exists due to the destruction of the unique environment. The Iraqi marshes shrank first due to the construction of hydroelectric dams that impounded the Tigris and Euphrates floodwaters that once sustained them, and then they were decimated when former President Saddam Hussein systematically drained what was left in the 1990s, forcing marsh dwellers to abandon an ancient way of life. The island villages, woven reed huts, networks of boat paths, and expansive reed forests that sustained that way of life remain preserved in U-2 photos.

Dr. Hammer hopes that Museum visitors will “have the same exciting feeling of time travel and discovery that I experience in seeing the human-scale details, hidden ancient landscapes and lost ways of life captured in these decades-old, declassified photos.”

U-2 photographs show the thin stone walls of prehistoric hunting traps, called "desert kites," located in the black basalt desert (Harra) of eastern Jordan. This is today an inhospitable desert, largely devoid of people except for isolated roads, but thousands of years ago it was a land of plenty for hunters and herders.

Emily Hammer is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Price Lab for the Digital Humanities. Jason Ur is the Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and the Director of its Center for Geographic Analysis.

THIS ARTICLE DRAWS ON:

Hammer, E. 2020. Spy Plane Photos Open Windows into Ancient Worlds. SAPIENS 21 February. https:// www.sapiens.org/archaeology/satellite-imagery/