CORONA Archaeological Atlas of the Middle East

FAIN: PW-50083-08

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (Fayetteville, AR 72701-1201)
Jesse J. Casana (Project Director: July 2007 to December 2011)

The creation of a digital archaeological atlas of selected sites from the greater Near East (North Africa to Central Asia) based on CORONA satellite images.

Archaeologists have long appreciated the the extraordinary power of aerial photography and satellite imagery to aid in the discovery and interpretation of arcaeological sites, the recognition of larger cultural landscape features. However in the Middle East, no imagey of adequate spatial resolution was available to archaeologists until 1995, when a large archive of US intelligence satellite images from the 1960s and 1970s, know as CORONA, were declassified and made publicly available. These images provide stunning, high resolution views of the landscape before urbanization and expansion, and have been employed recently in a handful of innovative archaeological projects in the Middle East. However, these images as distributed by the USGS exhibit severe distortions and must be photogrammetrically corrected making them useful to only a handful of specialists. This project will develop and distribe a digital CORONA satellite imagery-based archaeological atlas of the Middle East.