Declassified Corona spy satellite images showing Roman forts at three sites in the eastern Mediterranean: Sura, a Roman fortress city nearby the Parthian territories ; Resafa, a site near the Roman-Persian border and Ain Sinu, a zone alternately claimed by the Romans, the Parthians and the Sasanians .
Declassified Corona spy satellite images showing Roman forts at three sites in the eastern Mediterranean: Sura, a Roman fortress city nearby the Parthian territories ; Resafa, a site near the Roman-Persian border and Ain Sinu, a zone alternately claimed by the Romans, the Parthians and the Sasanians .
The huge Roman Empire, stretching at its largest from Britain to Egypt, was also struggling to maintain its borders, in part due to sheer size and in part due to incursions from nomadic groups grappling withbetween two heirs in 395 CE, after the death of Emperor Theodosius I. The western side was gradually taken over by other peoples, while the eastern side persisted in what we now call the Byzantine Empire down to roughly the 1400s CE.
"Because these images preserve a high-resolution, stereo perspective on a landscape that has been severely impacted by modern-day land-use changes, including urban expansion, agricultural intensification and reservoir construction, they constitute a unique resource for archaeological research," the study authors stated in their work, published Thursday in Antiquity.
After downloading the images, however, came hours of processing to georeference and spatially correct the images. These processes are needed to accurately map features on the Earth's surface usingtechnology, which itself was originally used for the military as well. Archaeologists have reshared most of their work with the community via theled by the University of Arkansas' Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies.