Archaeology from Space Read online

  Weirdly magical though archaeology can be, my work often takes me far from those glamorous heights. I dig for ancient answers in places that do not look like much: a casual bystander might not assume that a modern soccer field next to a school could hold discoveries worthy of global headlines. But even if the site is not as gloriously intact as the Giza pyramids, it is my job to re-create with words or models what time has virtually destroyed.

  There’s no typical ancient site, even within the same country, and preservation varies from place to place. Only 20 kilometers south of Giza, you see towering, misshapen mud-brick hills, the melting interiors of pyramids built much later that have succumbed more rapidly to the depredations of people and time. Likewise, archaeological sites can range in size from great settlements to tiny campsites in the desert.

  Let’s just fine-tune the definition of a site, for a moment. Walking through the woods of Alabama, especially near lakes or streams, you might find clusters of arrowheads or other stone tools. Each one of those clusters is considered a site.1 The same is true if you walk in the deserts of the American Southwest. You could encounter a larger unmapped site, such as remains of a building or even a village, but most likely it’ll be a tiny scatter of ceramics, stone implements, or the remains of a small campsite.

  Sites Are Filmstrips, Not Photographs

  Among the suggestions of what once existed, the promise of our own future demise is readily evident. In English, we say “ruin.” The word connotes destruction and suggests something negative, rather than normal or inevitable. In Arabic, on the other hand, my favorite word is athar. It can be roughly understood as “archaeology.” Linguists would tell you it’s more finely translated as “remnant,” which suggests the remains of an ancient culture that hint at a hidden completeness. When you say, “Ana doctora athar farony” (“I am a doctor of the archaeology of ancient Egypt”), people understand your profession as Egyptologist. Archaeologists are thus professional “remnant-ologists,” dealing in fragments of pottery, bits of amulets, and random pieces of hieroglyphic text, all waiting to be woven together.

  The case of Palmyra, the great multicultural Syrian city at the edge of the ancient East-West divide, has sparked a modern confrontation revolving around different interpretations of the word “ruin.” In 2015, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, blew up the Temple of Bel and a graceful series of columns at Palmyra. Turning a venue for concerts and tourist picnics into a place of nightmares, ISIL conducted executions in the well-preserved Roman amphitheater and displayed their murdered victims among the ruins, including the great archaeologist of Palmyra, Dr. Khaled Al-Asaad.2

  Debates have raged in the archaeological community about rebuilding the temple, using archival photographs as guides. Some people think it would be beautiful, and appropriate, to see that glorious old site rise again in splendor. But here’s the complication: Palmyra traded cultures many times until reaching its height under the empress Zenobia, whose reign ended in 272 AD. The Roman emperor Aurelian allowed his soldiers to sack the city in 273 AD. Then in 1400, the Timurids razed the city again, reducing it to a small town.3

  What we see at the site of Palmyra today is a complex series of layers of destruction, the remnants of global power struggles and shifting political alliances—including ISIL’s occupation. Some feel that to reconstruct the Temple of Bel is to erase ISIL’s atrocity instead of recognizing it and honoring the shattered moment in perpetuity so that we do not forget.

  Sites are not static. They are akin to a filmstrip through time, in which building and destruction alternate, sometimes concurrently. As we do our best to capture these partially obscured images, places exist in our imaginations, ideal or ruined, evoked when we first step into the liminal zone of a site. We face past and present, all at once.

  Projecting a Single Frame

  Capturing a snapshot of exact moments, or even periods of time, is difficult. One reason is that few well-preserved examples of ancient cities exist in the world. The most famous is Pompeii, frozen by a volcanic eruption. Anyone who studies the past must smile, seeing tourists gawk at reliefs of phalli near Pompeii’s brothels.4 It’s the sense that Roman Pompeiians and modern oglers share that same reaction, 2,000 years apart.

  But even here, there is still something missing. Or rather, someone—a lot of someones.

  Ancient sites are ghost towns. If anyone from antiquity happens to be there … run. Without a sense of its people, sites become places of monuments, not of activity, however difficult it is to reconstruct the motivations and aspirations of communities who lived thousands of years ago. Context of the material culture they left becomes everything, so we gain insights into use, function, and purpose, to reach the people behind the objects. After carefully collecting the evidence, we study how each piece relates to the others, and squeeze every last drop of data and insight we can from them.

  Some people believe sites contain echoes of their former inhabitants. Whatever your beliefs, consider a place like Deir el Medina, the Egyptian New Kingdom village where workers who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived.5 Today, you see the whole community outlined in mud-mortared limestone walls that survive to a meter or taller. The site tempts you to imagine what happened 3,500 years ago, in the two-story homes that rose from those footprints. Cut off from views of the nearby fertile Nile floodplain, you feel as though you’re moving through a secret and sacred place, home to the great artisans whose work fuels feverish archaeological dreams today.

  We See Dead People

  Archaeologists can find signs of ancient lives if we look hard enough in the thumbprints on pottery, the chisel marks left on stone, and everywhere in the beauty of things designed for people long ago.

  But cemeteries, naturally, represent the best bet for finding the actual remains of people. They’re typically placed away from living spaces in defined areas for the dead, in some cases near holy sites; think of burial grounds near churches.

  Getting to know an actual human being from their bones is not easy: it’s the specialist job of physical anthropologists, who also go by the science-fictional-sounding term bioarchaeologists. Skeletons contain a wealth of data about us. If enough well-preserved bones turn up and you know what to look for, you can usually ascertain an individual’s sex, height, nutritional status, and approximate age, and sometimes the diseases from which the deceased suffered—and which may have been the cause of death. Even teeth tell tales. Avid followers of the paleo diet would hardly be so keen on the paleo dental plan, which included treating cavities with flint tools.6

  Also, through the overall health of the bones, the context in which they’re found, and any associated grave goods, archaeologists can suggest the social status of the individuals. Repetitive motions over a lifetime leave their mark in ways that inform anthropologists and sometimes reveal occupations. At Tell Tebilla,7 a site two hours’ drive northeast of Cairo, an excavation team led by my husband, Gregory Mumford, came across a case of art brought to life by archaeological evidence.

  Map showing the location of Tell Tebilla [MAP COURTESY CHASE CHILDS]

  We excavated a burial of a woman with very strong muscle attachments on her left shoulder. This might have been quite a puzzle, but an artifact in the Metropolitan Museum of Art suggested a cause.8 The carved wooden image depicted a young woman in a colorful beaded dress carrying an offering atop her head—supporting it with her left hand. Our lady at Tell Tebilla had apparently spent her life carrying heavy loads in a similar way, just as modern Egyptian women still do, deepening the muscle-attachment groove of her larger-than-normal left bicep.

  Occasionally we find that ancient people suffered from problems that are usually thought to be modern. In an analysis of 22 mummies at the Cairo Museum, bioarchaeologists found evidence for atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, in more than half the individuals. Most probably, it seems, these people ate too much beef.9

  By assembling data about the dead from sites of the same t
ime period and looking for patterns, we gain insights into the population that allow us to make inferences about why things happened for that entire culture. Perhaps disease overtook society, affecting specific groups. Or a famine wiped out everyone. Too many skeletons from healthy, strong young men could even suggest war.

  Ages at death can, ironically, indicate whether the population is healthy. Physical anthropologists will tell you that they expect to see specific ages represented across the spectrum in a cemetery, and when adult ages skew too young, something significant happened to cause the high number of otherwise healthy young adults’ deaths at that time.

  Methods like DNA research open new possibilities into understanding the past, such as piecing together family relationships from the interwoven tendrils of our ancestors. A recent study on the mummies of two supposed brothers tells a fascinating tale worthy of any daily talk show. The mummies of Khnum-Nakht and Nakht-Ankh, dating to the Middle Kingdom, around 1800 BC, have sarcophagi with lifelike carved faces. They reside at the Manchester Museum in England.10

  Using DNA sequencing, researchers discovered that the mummies belonged to mitochondrial haplotype M1a1, showing they had the same mother. But differences in the Y chromosome meant different fathers.11 I have so many questions. Did the father of the older brother die, leaving the woman to remarry? What struggles did she face as a widowed mother? We’ll never know, but the data helps us to imagine the possibilities and allows us to be more empathetic.

  Ways to Get Closer to the Past

  Reimagining the past requires a leap of faith accompanied by a healthy dose of science. We cannot travel back in time to see people smelting copper or mummifying the dead, but we can re-create past technologies using experimental archaeology.12 This allows us to rebuild features like ovens or kilns based on archaeological findings and their associated fuel sources, and reproduce everyday tools, pottery, and swords.13 Archaeologists have made innumerable breakthroughs discovering how and why past people made things, although some techniques remain difficult to re-create, such as the complex inlays in ancient jewelry.

  More successfully, Kumar Akhilesh and Shanti Pappu looked at the waste products from the production of lithic stone tools at the site of Attirampakkam in northern India. Dating to the Acheulean era, 1.76 million to 130,000 years ago, the site contained evidence of the production of thousands of lithic tools. The team used experimental knapping to learn more about ancient techniques, and the study helped them to understand decisions past people made about stone sourcing and manufacturing processes.14

  My Egyptologist colleagues have even conducted real-life mummifications of animals that had died naturally and, for one television show, of a man who had volunteered for the treatment prior to passing away.15 Maybe when they finished filming that segment, they said it was a wrap!

  Another field of study, ethnoarchaeology,16 focuses on how cultures today may connect to past groups in the same area. Clear differences exist between the pottery workshops of the modern Egyptian Delta and those from ancient sites, yet when I visit, I find potters hunched over their wheels in the same way that’s depicted in ancient Egyptian models. Potters today add straw, or chaff, to their clay to strengthen it for firing, just as the ancient Egyptians did; if you peer through a magnifying glass at the edges of ancient pottery fragments, you can see clear chaff imprints.17

  Cognitive archaeology18 takes the experiment even further, attempting to deconstruct the actions and thoughts of past people, and how they experienced their worlds. We can gain these insights not only through the study of cultures’ material products and architecture, but from their languages and the landscapes that inspired them.

  Sometimes, though, we get a fortuitous download of ancient thoughts in the form of letters, and we can imagine the person scribbling away, carefully choosing words. One of my favorite letters dates to 1,800–1,900 years ago, from the Egyptian site of Oxyrhynchus. In the letter, a young boy, Theon, vents his anger to his father that he had left for Alexandria without Theon. He says he will not speak to Dad or even eat, unless he reconsiders taking him to the big city.19 You can see him sulking and refusing dinner—then sneaking to the kitchen later on. Doesn’t any teenager today throw fits for being kept out of grown-up business?

  Panning Out

  But to scale up from familial relationships and out to site relationships with the surrounding landscape, we need more perspective. Spatial imagery of all kinds can give us this data. While we cannot see everything as it once appeared, at least we can get enough clues about the ancient locations of rivers, canals, lakes, and the likely size of sites to make a decent reconstruction. Satellites and aerial data can see only so much, and they still require testing on the ground: we can guess from space, but we cannot know what is beneath the pixels.

  Unexpected people find things in unexpected places that show us how little we know. In 2004, Abdullah Al-Saeed, the leader of an amateur archaeological group, found enigmatic features in western Arabia’s lava fields.20 He did not realize the extent and scale of these “gates”—a new archaeological site type—until four years later when he turned to high-resolution satellite imagery available on Google Earth and Bing.

  Al-Saeed sent the images to David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia, who is well known for his aerial archaeological surveys of Jordan. Kennedy then located 400 of these features up to 1,600 feet long, some of which could be more than 7,000 years old. This concentration of stone structures may indicate large-scale landscape design during a wetter period, perhaps a water diversion or flood management system. Ground surveys are planned to explore them further, but the story shows how new chapters can be opened for areas considered inhospitable and uninhabitable today, all because a single structure intrigued interested private citizens.

  This discovery tells a tale of widespread human–landscape interaction over time; but reconstructing a single important episode in human history can only be done with a caveat. “Once upon a time” are the hidden words in every archaeological report. Most of us have a hard time reconstructing what happened last week in our own lives, but archaeologists must try to reconstruct entire ancient life spans. We are continuously editing our anecdote mechanisms, adapting our sagas for the latest publications and conference presentations—it’s something of a balancing act between science and fiction.

  Once upon a Time …

  Here’s a story, then, inspired by a surprise discovery from space at Tell Tebilla. It captures the beginning of the end of Pharaonic Egypt more than 2,000 years ago.

  The year was 343 BC. An anxious Persian king named Artaxerxes III sailed southwest down a Nile tributary. His history lessons might have taught him that this land was once a swamp, where dense marshes filled with crocodiles prevented foreigners from entering the country. Now, a large river entrance stood clear for him, between islands of reeds, leading straight to a city known as “the beautiful mouth,” or Ro-nefer, in the local language.

  Artaxerxes commanded a 40-meter-long galley with 200 men, flanked by an armada bearing his army, hungry for battle and the possibility of plunder. This town would not disappoint. Spies had told him of its treasures—gold and incense from Nubia, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, and luxury wines from the Greek islands: after all, it was the northernmost trade port in Egypt.21

  Three-story houses of affluent merchants, densely packed, appeared across the reed beds as the ship rounded a bend in the river. And at the city’s heart, the huge fortified wall of a temple loomed. Artaxerxes had studied his strategy well enough to know that tearing it out—throwing down the walls and destroying its idols—would break the citizens. His men rowed quietly through the early mist, and the king perhaps allowed himself a small smile. Ro-nefer would not last the morning.

  Today, Tell Tebilla appears as a brown mound, rising abruptly from lush, neon-green rice paddies. When you drive onto the site, the only hint of its ancient date is a small cluster of thick-cut limestone sarcophagi near the edge of a defunct water-trea
tment plant of pink brick. The village of Et-Till sits around the site now, home to a thousand rural souls, a far cry from the ancient cosmopolitan city beneath their feet. Around 200 years ago, the mound measured a kilometer by a kilometer in size. Now it is one-tenth that. Over time, farmers have hauled away most of the phosphorus-rich soil, called sebakh, to use as fertilizer.

  Archaeological work began at Tebilla in the early 1900s, when French archaeologists found statues of seated scribes dating to ca. 600 BC.22 Egypt’s then Supreme Council of Antiquities brought the site to the attention of my husband, Greg, in the late 1990s, when he mentioned an interest in starting an independent excavation mission.23 No published work on it had appeared in nearly a hundred years.

  Excavating the Beautiful Mouth

  Our initial survey confirmed the location of a temple, based on the architectural fragments around the water-treatment plant. Built by the United States Agency for International Development to combat unsanitary drinking water, such plants can be found overlaying sites across Egypt, and their presence often made mounds into targets for further development, including the construction of schools. The unfortunate siting caused heavy losses to the study of urban archaeology.

  Construction of the water-treatment plant here had destroyed the temple building’s foundations, and we could only guess at what it looked like long ago. Our goal for investigating the site included mapping it and finding out about the ancient city of Ro-nefer and the people who had lived there.

  Named for the regional capital, Mendes, some 40 kilometers to the southwest, the Mendesian branch of the Nile flowed by the site in antiquity, but no clues appeared on the surface to tell us anything else. We began our work with coring at and around the site, to get a sense of its past size and the location of the ancient river course. Our geoarchaeologist, or geology specialist, a gray-haired, bearded, energetic imp named Larry Pavlish, carried out the coring and a magnetometer survey to reveal the hidden mud-brick foundations of the buildings underfoot.