Thursday, September 15, 2011

More on Mideast Aerial Surveying

This article actually does contain the word "cairn" - but this is not New England related.

I followed a link suggested by a commenter (a couple days ago here) to look at "serpent mounds" on the Golan Heights and soon became addicted to looking down at blank desert from above with Google Earth. As far as I can tell there is non stop archeology from the Mediterranean to India. There is an incredible density of structures, you can see cities, animal enclosures, alignments, stone circles, irrigation systems, fields, plots, some weird wedge/rectangle shapes that are quite like some of the Nazca lines (unlike what is seen in the above article which is not really like Nazca). It goes on and on.

By contrast, looking down at our own deserts - say- in New Mexico, there are many fewer man made structures visible. But I bet there are some surprises somewhere on this continent. Now that I am addicted to this aerial hunting, I plan on having a closer look around Hudson's Bay, and up in the dry parts of Washington and Oregon.

To the Google Earth Viewer.....away!

4 comments :

Tim MacSweeney said...

Google the phrase "complex hunter gatherers" and you get lots of results for the Pacific North West - and Syria. It has to do with manipulation of the natural environment, like I suggest occured in what's called "Southern New England," and other places where "mysterious stone structures" are attributed to almost anyone but Native Americans, places where it's always mentioned that Indians burned over different sections of the landscape, creating that Cultural and Ceremonial Landscape that I suggest is the explaination of the stone rows that pre-date 1620 in the northeast...

Anonymous said...

Try 43*17’50.27”N – 71*35’28.94”W if you wish to see something a little closer to home. Sometime within the upcoming year, I’ll have to take a road trip to that spot.
Rob

Anonymous said...

Good article!

Ron Smith has collected some of the Google Earth links I have sent him regarding these structures.

http://hgtitle.com/str_Googled_Structures.htm

They can be found in Golan, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and South Africa. dave c.

pwax said...

Funny, no decent resolution for images west of Hudson's Bay. What is up with that?