Issue 97: Archaeology
In this week’s issue:
- Using new tech to uncover the past
- The materials we leave behind
- China’s newest corporate city
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Feature Story: Archaeology
The modern-day Indiana Jones has less whips, more high tech equipment, but an equal amount of wide-brimmed hats and swashbuckling allure. Archaeology is perhaps best known for its practice of literally digging into the past to reveal, trace, and document humanity’s ancient history. But the trope of intrepid adventurers plunging into the deep jungle to uncover ruins is, perhaps unexpectedly, a bit exaggerated. Archeologists today abide by a more scientific procedure and utilize cutting-edge tools that help us see deeper into the past and teach us about what might lie in the future.
As it turns out, it’s pretty difficult to build things that last. Earth’s elements, weather, tectonic activity, and all the other terms in the geographer’s glossary actively work to wear and tear ancient structures down. For these artifacts to persist through the millennia takes one part solid design, one part concerted conservation efforts, and a generous helping of luck. Consider what it took for the Sacred City of Caral-Supe to survive for 5,000 years in what is now Peru.
Earth eventually erodes all constructions, but humans have an uncanny tendency to speed up the process. And as long as we’ve been storing treasures in the ground, we’ve been digging them up. Tomb raiding dates back to the time of ancient Egyptians, which is as astonishing as it is a good lesson in the relativity of time. But the pillaging of archaeological sites and shady dealings around artifacts have exploded in the past few centuries. So too has the movement to return cultural heritage back to where it was taken.
Artifact looting is so popular in part because of how much we value these sites and items within them. Many of the largest conquests of history, like Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the 18th century, have made it a point to pillage any artifact not literally tied down or carved into the Earth. But new technologies like Earth observation satellites make it far more difficult for looters to fly under the radar.
During conflict in Syria in the early 2010s, looting spiked at several valuable archeological sites that contained relics from parts of the fertile crescent, or the cradle of civilization. Satellite data was still entering mainstream usage at the time, but studies analyzed images to show the extent of the looting. Over the course of the conflict, thousands of holes were dug at certain sites, marking the treasures excavated that soon vanished into black markets.
But the same tools used to locate and chronicle destruction of archeological sites can be used to discover new ones too. One team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has used remote sensing technology to uncover thousands of new sites and ancient features. And others looking into the heavily forested area in Manu National Park use multiple datasets with satellite coverage to find suitable flat areas and identify patterns that could point to potential archaeological discoveries.
If you want to reconstruct an ancient medieval village, either attend a renaissance fair or use satellite imagery to establish a layout from a real one. That’s what researchers did with a medieval village located at Santul Turcilor near Masloc, Romania. Using various satellite indices and geophysical techniques, they were able to delineate the outlines of the town without having to excavate any of the site.
The low-hanging plots have all been found, so in order to find new ones modern archaeologists are using high tech tools to bypass certain obstructions. Lidar uses lasers to see through trees and surveys forested areas like Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where a thousand-year-old city was recently discovered. Archaeologists still have a hard time keeping their hands out of the dirt though, so they pair this work with on-the-ground expeditions and hand-held tools like ground-penetrating radar.
Just last month, memes about the Roman Empire made the rounds on social media, revealing the lasting impact ancient empires have far into the future. The new tools allow archaeologists to survey more in a less intrusive fashion. Which is good, because it’s easy to forget that this age of mass urbanization, development, and breakneck pace of change is built on a foundation of deep cultural heritage. But it does beg the question: what will we leave behind when it’s all over?
Remote Sensations: Technofossils
If you want an exercise in deep time, consider that Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than the construction of the pyramids. Another is to consider that our cities today will be the archeological ruins of tomorrow. Go further still and much of what you see around you will be fossils; centuries of history and construction reduced to a single stratigraphic layer. Technofossils describe the material footprint we’ll leave behind on our planet, and as it turns out, it’s going to be a big one.
We’ve been obsessed with leaving imprints ever since we placed our painted hands on a cave wall. It’s so intrinsic that our footprints are found on other planets too. But the magnitude of these impressions have deepened. Human-made materials now outweigh all living matter on Earth. And if there’s anything we’ve learned from archaeology, it’s that what we produce far outlasts us. Whether we want that legacy made from concrete, plastic, and nuclear waste is a question worth answering.
Change of the Week: Net City
Tencent, the Chinese technology company with a cheap name but an enormously expensive portfolio, is building a midtown-Manhattan-sized, car-less, green city in Shenzhen. Net City, as it’s called, is expected to finish later this decade, but a number of skyscrapers were constructed in the past few years. The project comes as China faces uncertainty about its massive investments in infrastructure and real estate.
All imagery Ⓒ 2023 Planet Labs PBC
Editor: Ryder Kimball | Images: Ryder Kimball, Max Borrmann, Julian Peschel, and Maarten Lambrechts
