
Declassified U-2 spy plane photos are a boon for aerial archaeology - pseudolus
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/declassified-u-2-spy-plane-photos-are-boon-aerial-archaeology
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saagarjha
Desert kites: they're mentioned in passing in the article and I was curious so
I looked them up. Apparently they're 5000 year old traps for gazelles that can
be kilometers long:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_kite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_kite)

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LeifCarrotson
Funny how they were named by "pilots who first saw them from the air in the
1920s" and not by the people who built them.

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joosters
Since they were abandoned about 4000 years ago, I'd imagine that it's quite
hard to find any records of their original name...

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twic
_Hammer and colleague Jason Ur, an anthropologist at Harvard University,
created a systematized index of several thousand U-2 photos taken on 11
reconnaissance missions throughout the Middle East_

Fantastic bit of nominative determinism:

 _Jason Ur is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at
Harvard University, and director of its Center for Geographic Analysis. He
specializes in early urbanism_

As well he might:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur)

~~~
TomK32
I wonder what his favourite game might be. One I still have an unfinished
implementation in C lying around.

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libertyhouse
The U-2 is the only U.S. surveillance aircraft still flying a "wet film"
camera called the Optical Bar Camera, or OBC. Ironically, this relatively old
technology keeps the U-2 mission from being completely transitioned to other
aircraft like Global Hawk, due to the film imagery being easily releasable and
able to be declassified.

Around 2007, a PC-104 embedded computer running Linux was integrated into the
OBC camera to allow correlation of flight data with the imagery, as well as
supply an OBC camera status page on the cockpit multi-function display.

~~~
sorenjan
Why is film easier to declassify and release than digital imagery?

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kilo_bravo_3
Film's properties are known and understood and there aren't any "super films"
that are better or more capable than another country's. Lenses are also
understood.

With electro-optical (EO) sensors, great care must be taken to reduce the
quality of the final product when it is publicly released so that adversaries
do not gain a complete understanding of the what the sensors are capable of.

Film creates "better" images, but modern EO sensors are more capable in
certain circumstances.

There is all kinds of computational and electronic trickery one can do to
obtain images that may be impossible to capture on film that you want to keep
secret, like fusing short wavelength IR with visible light or using it to
discipline visible light to correct or reduce atmospheric distortion. Other EO
technologies can determine what an object is made of from great distances.

Technologies like that you want to keep secret.

In a hypothetical Cuban Missile Crisis set in 2019, US analysts would have
visible, near- and short wavelength-infrared, thermal, and pan-chromatic
imagery to look at, but the 2019 version of Adlai Stevenson would still only
show the visible images at the UN.

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sandworm101
There were superfilms, film stock sensitive in the infrared/UV spectrum and
filters to optimize such film. There was also film sensitive only to very
specific colors. Releasing images from these, at any resolution, would indeed
give away much of the program's abilities/goals.

The ability to more easily declassify film stock is due less to the technology
and more to the bureaucracy within intel communities. The film stock is owned
by a single agency and so the declassification authority is relatively
straightforwards. Digital imagery is shared instantly with a host of different
agencies, many of whom still do not talk to each other regularly, and is
stored in countless archives. Declassifying a digital file is therefore an
administrative burden in comparison to a roll of film kept by a specific
agency.

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varjag
These were all known since 1920s-1960s and very little progress has been made
since. Everything you named is bog standard film photography practices.

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sandworm101
Yes but the use of a particular technique in a particular location/time would
divulge the specific collection goals of an operation, something that often
remains classified long after the operation itself has been acknowledged. So
while the existence of UV film is no secret, knowledge that it was being
employed over a specific site at a specific time can be.

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paganel
For those interested in aerial archeology I also heartily recommend what Roger
Agache did in (mostly) Northern and Central France starting with the 1960s.
His aerial photos helped discover hundreds of locations for Roman-era villas
and castra among other very interesting things. The website documenting his
work can be found here [1], and for example aerial photos of Gallo-Romanic
structures can be found at this link [2] (the website looks like it hasn't
been updated in quite some time but it's still functional)

[1] [http://www.archeologie-
aerienne.culture.gouv.fr/en/](http://www.archeologie-
aerienne.culture.gouv.fr/en/)

[2] [http://www.archeologie-
aerienne.culture.gouv.fr/en/](http://www.archeologie-
aerienne.culture.gouv.fr/en/)

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anc84
If this triggered your curiosity, have fun with
[http://www.apaame.org/](http://www.apaame.org/)

> The Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East was
> established in 1978 by Professor David Kennedy under the patronage of Prince
> Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. The archive now consists of over 91,000
> photographs and several hundred maps of a dozen countries. The vast majority
> of this material can be viewed online in our digital archive at Flickr.

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Abishek_Muthian
>In recent years, the Islamic State group gutted archaeologically important
Iraqi sites in Mosul and Raqqa and Syrian sites in Aleppo and Palmyra.

Not to forget Buddha of Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

It is disheartening to think that, these sites & artefacts which were
preserved for thousands of years are destroyed during our lifetime.

Perhaps because of its familiarity we value it higher, but powerful people in
several parts of the world have been systematically destroying historical
objects of value to a culture or civilisation to push forward their ideology.

Edit : Edited to be succinct.

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microcolonel
> _Perhaps because of its familiarity we value it higher, but powerful people
> in several parts of the world have been systematically destroying historical
> objects of value to a culture or civilisation to push forward their
> ideology._

This is a particular feature of utopian ideology; marxists, islamists,
fascists, etc. seek to carve utopia from reality, and the artifacts which
prove that there's something else are just in the way. A look at what's
preserved in Taiwan should make you weep to know what was lost just a little
bit to the west.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
I guess a less violent form of it practised by every country, even the
democratic ones is falsifying history text books from grade school.

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microcolonel
Yeah, Canadian grade school history textbooks are a joke. Be a good parent,
don't let your kids get all of their historical education from your school
district's standard textbook. :- )

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dredmorbius
Specifics might aid your argument.

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microcolonel
In my experience, there was no mention of the broader historical origins of
Canada, the focus was generally on a) stories framed to make French Canadians
look interesting and blameless (especially long sections on coureurs de bois),
and b) stories of amicable arrangements with native Americans, conveniently
away from the various times the public's government has broken promises to
various communities in Canada.

I'm an adult, why would I have the worst history books I've ever read, which
were on loan from the school when I was in school, in my personal library to
share specifics from?

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dredmorbius
Thanks for the first.

I'd not made any demands to the latter point, though there are times when
keeping a spectacularly bad example around for debate, discussion, or
reference can prove handy.

I'd put specific store in rough order "steelman" or best-case defenses or
arguments for the indefensible, officially sanctioned references (as with
textbooks), or with particularly poular bad examples, even if not particularly
cogent.

Knowing your enemy, testing your own beliefs and biases, and walking into
battle fully armed, are all benefits.

You don't need to find endless such examples (see also: Gish Gallop), but a
carefully selected few can be exceedingly useful.

This applies to other areas as well, tech included.

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microcolonel
> _Knowing your enemy, testing your own beliefs and biases, and walking into
> battle fully armed, are all benefits._

Sure, to be clear, I grew up with two older brothers and a younger sister, in
three different major cities, in three different provinces in Canada, and the
history curriculum has largely lacked much particular detail. My history
curricula, and that of my brothers, included little or no international
history, ancient history, or national history. The main topics of every
history textbook (the only source for each curriculum, in my experience) I've
seen in Canada (including my brothers', for years I didn't attend in a given
school district) have been an obscure subset of clean indigenous stories, and
a handful of stories about early Québec.

I'm not saying these history textbooks are especially bad _among government
school history textbooks_ , but that they are bad in a general sense, and fail
to give much perspective on the origin of the tapestry of nations in Canada,
or the story of our legal and governmental traditions.

A better job could be done with an in-depth reading of a mature historical
author's work, the kind of thing you would read if you had a personal interest
in understanding the history of _something_.

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tony_cannistra
I'm working with some researchers who are using similar recently-declassified
spy plane imagery from the '60s for an analysis of glacier size + movement
changes over time, which is another cool use case.

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maxxxxx
Somehow I always thought the U-2 is like a gliding plane, quiet and slow. But
then I saw one at an airshow last year and I was pretty impressed how loud and
powerful the plane sounded. It also climbed extremely steeply which kind of
makes sense considering that it has get up to 30 km altitude within a
reasonable time.

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8bitsrule
Recommend the book "The Past from Above" by George Gerster for those who enjoy
'aerial archeology'. 500+ photos taken from lower altitudes back in the 1950s
and 1960s. (Can be had in paper, if you can't find the coffee-table-size
hardcover.)

Review:
[http://www.historyinreview.org/ggerster.html](http://www.historyinreview.org/ggerster.html)

ISBN-Book sources:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-89236-81...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-89236-817-9)

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bookofjoe
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19587495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19587495)

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gus_massa
Repost are usual
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
and sometimes the same link is ignored one time and gets traction other time.
It's matter of the day of the week, the hour of the submission, the other post
that are trending, the number of users reading the newest page, the phase of
the moon, and many other factors. Just assume that it's a mater of luck.

Linking the old post is useful when it has some interesting comments (I
sometimes quote partially the most interesting comment.) But in this case the
older post got only 2 points and no comments.

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bookofjoe
I like this: "It's matter of the day of the week, the hour of the submission,
the other posts that are trending, the number of users reading the newest
page, the phase of the moon, and many other factors."

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cracauer
What I want is some of those lenses and put them on my Canon. Looks like
"pretty good" pieces of glass.

