Giant archaeological trove found in Google Earth

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/02/giant-archaeological-trove-fou.html

Indiana Jones, put down your whip. To scour the globe for archaeological sites these days all you need is a desktop computer.

Almost two thousand potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia have been discovered from an office chair in Perth, Australia, thanks to high-resolution satellite images from Google Earth.

"I've never been to Saudi Arabia," says David Kennedy from the University of Western Australia, Australia. "It's not the easiest country to break into."

Instead Kennedy scanned 1240 square kilometres in Saudi Arabia using Google Earth. From their birds-eye view he found 1977 potential archaeological sites, including 1082 "pendants" - ancient tear-drop shaped tombs made of stone.

More at the link --

[RandomThoughts]

1. Tear drop stones.

There is a story in a book that I was going to write. I realized it was not fiction, but a story of what was going on. Since then I realized the entire story was actually trying to help with situations.


Part of that story is a great army, that goes down the hill to disrupt the corrupt group.

From a distance, it was reported to have looked like tears from the mountain.

[hlthe2b]

2. Does not surprise me...

The troves of ancient archeological findings that lie buried under the sands in SA could only be tremendous, given so little attention given to their discovery. While some attention is given to preserving their more modern history (fortress outside Riyadh that dates to the early days of the kingdom and the so-called "mud palace" some distance outside the city), Saudi Arabia as a country essentially closed to tourism has little incentive to discover and preserve the more ancient sites. I remember hiring a driver to visit the mud palace during a temporary teaching stint in SA. I was the only person there. It was eerie, though not really frightening. Just strange. No tour guides... just a few signs, yet this would have been a very important site, attracting scores of visitors, anywhere else.

[L. Coyote]

3. Ancient Monuments Placemarks

Check these out:
http://jqjacobs.net/archaeo/sites/index.html