January 28, 2003

BY NANCY MOFFETT PARKS AND MUSEUMS REPORTER

Satellite spy photos taken decades ago are giving University of Chicago researchers a map of what they think are 5,000-year-old roads in what is now northern Iraq and Syria.

The photos reveal depressions so faint they can't be seen in the field and document the now invisible landscape that supported early cities, said Jason Ur, a researcher at U. of C.'s Oriental Institute.

Although it was possible to draw straight lines to connect urban centers and imagine where roads might have been, now "we can map them out,'' Ur said.

"Something that used to be inferred, we can now document,'' Ur said. "This is innovative.''

The research should help sketch out development of urban civilization in the area during the third millennium B.C., as contact with southern Mesopotamia was expanding.

The reconstructed landscape will help work out "whether these settlements were sustainable agriculturally and under which conditions,'' said Tony Wilkinson, research associate at the institute.

Ur said the spy photos are a cheap research tool: $18 apiece for each strip of film showing a stretch about 117 miles long.

The film was turned over to the U.S. Geologic Survey after President Bill Clinton declassified more than 860,000 images of the Earth's surface collected between 1960 and 1972 during the Cold War by the CORONA satellite system. The system was designed to check up on Soviet missile defenses.

The exposed film dropped off the satellite and parachuted down. Military planes scooped the canisters from the sky.

Although information in the photos is outdated for intelligence purposes, it is good for geographers, historians and archeologists, Ur said.

He and Wilkinson were able to make out ephemeral lines tracing ancient roads.

They don't follow a straight line. "You have to jump from city to city and town to town,'' Ur said.

"We're seeing the incredible importance of agriculture in the development of these places,'' he said.

Most of the roads, however, simply go out into the fields and end, showing up on the pictures as if they were spokes radiating out from a hub.

"These are cities of farmers,'' Ur said.

They trekked out for work and to pasture animals on the roads, which are up to 400 feet wide.

The work will be published in the spring issue of the journal Antiquity.