Declassified U-2 spy plane photos are a boon for aerial archaeology

It’s hard to know exactly how many were displaced, but a new study, first reported in , reveals a tool archaeologists and anthropologists can use to find out: declassified Cold War–era images snapped by U.S. Lockheed U-2 spy planes. To help their fellow researchers navigate the archive, Hammer and colleague Jason Ur, an anthropologist at Harvard University, created a systematized index of several thousand U-2 photos taken on 11 reconnaissance missions throughout the Middle East. In addition to the Iraqi marsh villages, they show predevelopment photos of the Nimrud canals and images of massive, prehistoric walled hunting traps called “desert kites” in eastern Jordan.

Source: www.sciencemag.org