Archaeology goes Google–eyed to protect Afghan heritage
David Thomas
An international team of archaeologists, led by PhD student David Thomas, has battled the odds and made important discoveries about key historic sites in the south of Afghanistan — with members conducting their research from the safety of their desks using the 'virtual globe' Google Earth.
The research has generated world-wide interest, with reports appearing in The Economist and on BBC Radio.
Mr Thomas says commercially available satellite images have been used by archaeologists since the 1980s to spot potential sites prior to fieldwork. Earlier this year, American archaeologist Professor Elizabeth Stone used high-resolution satellite images to assess the extent of looting at archaeological sites in Iraq. Her findings caused a political furore as she demonstrated that much of the looting has taken place since the allied invasion in 2003.
Mr Thomas' own use of satellite images and fieldwork in 2005, to study looting at the World Heritage Site of Jam in central Afghanistan, attracted less attention at the time, despite his team's discovery that more than 1,300 cubic metres of archaeological remains — eleven per cent of the surveyed area — had been destroyed by robbers who had left large holes at the site.
Frustrated in his efforts to continue fieldwork in central Afghanistan, Mr Thomas resorted to the 'poor man's' version of satellite imaging — Google Earth — as a way of reaching archaeological sites in parts of the country too dangerous for Westerners to visit.
He and his team surveyed a seventy-five kilometre by seventeen kilometre strip of the Registan desert in southern Afghanistan using Google Earth, which is freely available over the internet. He says each of the five images in the strip took nine hours of painstaking study to 'survey remotely'. The 1,800 possible archaeological sites initially identified were narrowed down to 450 probable sites after further cataloguing and cross-checking.
'We located the remnants of nomads' camp sites and animal corrals, deserted villages centred on mosques, sand-filled reservoirs, dams, kilometres of underground water channels and ancient fortified occupation mounds,' he says.
'Although dating is difficult without fieldwork, it is likely that a significant number of these previously unknown sites were occupied in the medieval period, more than a thousand years ago, when the Ghaznavid dynasty had its winter capital seventyfive kilometres away at the site of Bust - Lashkari Bazar.'
This massive site, its palaces, mosques, gardens and markets extending over seven kilometres along the banks of the Helmand River, was studied by French archaeologists from 1949-52, he says.
The site has remained largely unexplored since then — until Mr Thomas' team started studying Google Earth images of the area. The researchers presented their findings to the recent World Archaeological Congress in Dublin.
When the research is complete, Mr Thomas plans to pass on the findings to the National Afghan Institute of Archaeology in Kabul so that Afghan archaeologists can study and protect this newly discovered part of their past.
Rhonda Dredge