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CORONA Archaeological Atlas of the Middle East

 

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Project Overview

Archaeologists have long appreciated the extraordinary power of aerial photography and satellite imagery to aid in the discovery and interpretation of archaeological sites, the recognition of larger cultural landscape features such as roads, canals, and field systems, as well as the mapping and management of cultural resources. However, in the Near East, no imagery of adequate spatial resolution was available to archaeologists until 1995, when a large archive of US intelligence satellite images from the 1960s and 1970s, known as CORONA, were declassified and made publicly available. These images provide stunning, high resolution views of the landscape, and have been employed recently in a handful of innovative archaeological projects in the Near East. In these cases, use of CORONA imagery has revolutionized our understanding of the quantity and distribution of archaeological remains, fundamentally transformed field methodologies, and vastly improved our understanding of settlement histories. Moreover, because CORONA images are over 30 years old, they preserve a picture of archaeological sites prior to their destruction by recent industrialization and urban expansion, making CORONA imagery an absolutely unique resource that can never be replaced by new technologies.

The project has involved the acquisition of over 1500 images and the development of a new workflow to support their orthorectification and the distribution of these orthorectified images via the Internet.  A screen shot from the online CORONA Atlas of the Middle East (http://corona.cast.uark.edu) is shown below.

Year 4 Update