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Google Earth Used to Find Ancient Roman Villa

Posted by Zonk on Fri Sep 16, 2005 07:55 PM
from the i-have-a-pyramid-in-my-parking-lot dept.
Businesses Google The Internet Science
cavehobbit writes "Google Earth leads to an archeology find, according to a Nature article. From the article: 'Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river ...' What's buried in your back yard?"
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  • Next up from the Google Dog & Pony Show... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2005, @07:57PM (#13581749)
    WMD's in Iraq found!

  • I use Google Earth... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quaoar (614366) on Friday September 16 2005, @07:57PM (#13581750)
    ...to find my remote control. Though I guess it's hard to miss anyway, being 10 feet long.

    • Re:I use Google Earth... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Concerned Onlooker (473481) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:32PM (#13581908) Journal
      Though I guess it's hard to miss anyway, being 10 feet long.

      Yeah, I use a stick, too.

      Speaking of which, one day long ago my wife and I were laying on the floor lazily watching TV. We decided to chang the channel but neither of us had the remote in hand. Laying there on the floor with our heads propped against the couch we noticed the remote laying a few feet away. For some reason there was a yardstick lying within reach and my wife grabbed it and began using it to drag the remote towards us. When we realized just how pathetic this little tableau was we jumped up, turned off the TV and went outside.

  • In case you don't want to learn Italian
    linkage [google.com]
  • .. So long as he doesn't kill himself geocaching
    at that site his find might be worthwhile!

  • What's buried in my back yard (Score:4, Funny)

    by dotslasher_sri (762515) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:08PM (#13581799)
    deadbodies.

  • re: What's buried in your back yard?" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xmas2003 (739875) * on Friday September 16 2005, @08:09PM (#13581809) Homepage
    I just had 20 tons of stamped concrete [komar.org] poured into my backyard - I'm kinda curious to see if that shows up on the next satellite pass. Right now, the Boulder, Colorado footage comes from the summer of 2002 (easy to tell because we had a major drought) - sure would be nice if they date stamped the imagery.

  • let me know when (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2005, @08:10PM (#13581810)
    Googe Earth can find where I left my damn keys

  • buried (Score:3, Funny)

    by RevengeOfPoopJuggler (872968) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:14PM (#13581832) Journal
    What's buried in your back yard?

    Those meddling kids and their dopey great dane

  • Fantastic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fsh (751959) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:15PM (#13581839)
    I hope we see a lot more of this. It's like when airplanes became common, and suddenly lots of great archeaological sites were found, like the Nasca desert drawings.

    I'm sure Google isn't exactly hurt by the excellent free press, either.

    • It would not surprise me (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jd (1658) <[moc.oohay] [ta] [kapimi]> on Friday September 16 2005, @10:52PM (#13582499) Homepage Journal
      The 12,000 year old site [marple-uk.com] currently being excavated in the town I grew up was discovered by chance during a severe drought - discoloration clearly marked outlines of ancient structures. The site has been worked by archaeologists for about 7 years now and they're uncovering a vast amount each year.


      (Having said that, the entire settlement is believed to be hundreds - if not thousands - of times larger than the area actually examined by archaeologists. Add in nearby standing stones and round barrows, and the area in need of study is maybe hundreds of thousands of times larger than what they've studied. Makes you wonder what they haven't found!)


      You can't expect a good pair of eyes (and a brain) to exist in every town or village that has ancient remains. On the other hand, with something like Google Maps, all it really requires is someone anywhere taking the time to look through the images.


      Well, if they're sophisticated enough, all they really need to do is write a good image processing algorithm that detects definite artifacts in the image (straight lines, circles, etc) that do NOT correspond to anything that is a definite surface structure. All the person need do then is search through the candidate images, not the entire database, which would be a much more practical task to do.


      Ideally, you'd use several layers of image processing, to whittle down the pool of images to highly probable cases, then subtract out known archaeological sites from a database.


      Really, really ideally, you'd program the individual layers as BOING components and run the computation part of it as a gigantic @Home venture, as this would be massively parallelizable and sufficiently CPU intensive for most academics who would be interested in such work to not be able to afford a computer (or cluster) that could actually carry out the work in a reasonable timeframe.


      Hmmmm. It's a pity Google don't cover enough of the UK in enough depth to be able to do good work there.

        • The world has plenty of futures to choose from, but it only has one past and if you lose something from it, it can't be replaced. As such, I'd argue that serious Government funding of archaeological projects (as a science, as a method of recording the past and as a method of conserving heritage) makes considerable sense.

          In England, you can do almost nothing in the way of construction without an archaeological survey of a site. Which is a sound and rational policy. Or would be, if the Government contributed

  • I found something I'd lost with Google Earth (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dlleigh (313922) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:17PM (#13581847)
    I had loaned six foot aluminum parabolic dish to a church group a number of years back so that they could try to pick up some satellite broadcasts. They never did use it and I forgot all about it.

    Along comes Google Earth with six inch resolution in Cambridge, Massachusetts and, lo and behold, there the thing is sitting upside down on their roof, next to the upright dish (which is casting a shadow) that they are currently using.

    To see it, go to:
    42d 22' 34.0" N 71d 07' 34.4" W
    and zoom in to about 50 feet.

  • my backyard? (Score:3, Informative)

    by polysylabic psudonym (820466) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:21PM (#13581867) Journal
    Not much to be found here. The Romans didn't find their way here, nor the Greeks, nor the Vikings. No populations with higher technology than the boomerang, spear and woomera (that's the spear throwing tool, rather than the rocket range) here until the 18th century, and those pre-european people weren't much into building buildings of the sort that leave a trace. Even our own civilisation's ruins top out at 200 odd years old, and around where I live only to about 80 years old.
    • I'd suggest you stop looking. If you were to find a big pile of shells, your house would be considered both an archaeological site and a sacred place that would be regulated as such.

      They are called middens and they are basically dumping grounds for used shellfish eaten by a community. In areas were there was no rock painting, they are the only perminent evidence of settlement.

      You do not want to find one of those things where you live.

    • Who knows, maybe you'll be the one to find evidence of a forgotten sea-faring neanderthal civilization no one knew about. Try to be a little more open minded.

  • ...and noticing some new Layers from National Geographic Magazine. Nowhere near Italy (I see the additions mostly in Africa), but I think they're worth looking at if you like finding random stuff with something Google... ;)

  • I can see why... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2005, @08:24PM (#13581882)
    this guy is doing archaeology.

    "Italian computer programmer"

    Sheesh, imagine the spaghetti code!

  • Village Resevoirs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by martalli (818692) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:28PM (#13581892) Homepage
    This reminds me of when I was living in India back in 1996. In an effort to find good sites for village resevoirs for irrigation, India used its new space satellites to find appropriate spots. Low and behold, many of the best sites held actual remains of previous resevoirs, which had been abandoned centuries before!

  • My backyard isn't in Google Earth (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zatar (131299) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:29PM (#13581895)
    My (parent's) house is in Ketchikan, Alaska. Google Earth just shows a big blurry picture of cloud cover. My friend outside of Fairbanks? Big blur. Vacation cabin in Michigan? Big blur.

    I mean, the program is cool and all, but I'm really disappointed that it seems the only places you can see very well are the highly-populated/popular places that there's already lots of established pictures of anyway. I'd really like to be able to explore places I can't easily get to otherwise.

    I have no idea if they plan to fix this or if anyone even bothers taking high-res pictures of places that aren't militarily interesting (or whatever criteria they use) but so far the program just seems to be a "hey, I can see my own house in the big city" novelty.

  • I used Google Earth to find something... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rindeee (530084) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:29PM (#13581896)
    ...in my neck of the woods. It's not nearly as cool as the find in the article, but it was cool to me. Being a trail-runner and ultra-marathoner, I'm always on the lookout for new trails. There are some good trails not far from my home that I like to run. I always wished that I could just run to the trail, but the roads between home and trail were simply not safe for running. I had tried to use my GPS to map out the trail and some of the woods near my house that I knew should be the closest point near the trail, but the density of the trees (even in winter) rendered my GPS useless. Using Google Earth a while back, I was able to get a nice birds eye view of the entire area near my home including some old access roads that I didn't know existed. Now, I can leave my house, run to the back of my subdivision, down a dirt log-road and through about 100M of woods where I pick up the "top" of the main trail that I run. I even printed it out in tiles on 8.5x11 paper which I scotch-taped together into a poor-mans map. Again, it's not a big deal to most, but to me it was priceless.
    • USAPhotoMaps is excellent for downloading and viewing USGS topo maps. The interface is terrible and clunky to use but once you figure it out, it's awesome. It also has a database of USGS landmarks that you can use. I use it when planning hiking trips.

      I know we hate Microsoft here but VirtualEarth has much higher resolution pictures of many areas. In general, I've found that once you're outside the major metropolitan areas MSNs maps are much better than Google's.

  • link to villa (Score:5, Informative)

    by Polo (30659) * on Friday September 16 2005, @08:29PM (#13581898) Homepage
    I think this link should show the villa:

    http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=44.881446,10.421513 &spn=0.007150,0.007532&t=k&hl=en [google.com]

  • 500m (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zoogies (879569)
    How do you miss something 500m long? Granted, the world is a big place, but I thought that SOMETHING would have found a great big 500m long object by now.

  • New insult (Score:5, Funny)

    by pardasaniman (585320) on Friday September 16 2005, @08:33PM (#13581915) Journal
    New /. insult.

    Your Mama, She's so fat, I typed her name in on google and saw a satellite photo of her!!
  • The best use I've found thus far for google's satellite images: finding train stations.

    Here in the United States, we're well into an era where road maps frequently don't have train stations indicated on them, and the Caltrains web pages don't see fit to give you a street address suitable for looking up an on-line map. But with Google's satellite imagery, I was able to scan along the train tracks looking for the station buildings.

    And I bet it's just as useful for pedestrians to see if it's actually pos

  • I just fired up google earth, I typed in "Sorba, Italy" and after it zoomed in (I view google maps at 1024X768 - full screen)

    I looked around Sorba, and after the full image loaded I could see what is very likely it - (Northwest- Up and left of Sorba). You can see it in a farmers field in the "brown" image stands out from the rest of green pictures.

  • reminds me of the story... (Score:5, Funny)

    by blue_adept (40915) on Friday September 16 2005, @09:00PM (#13582001)
    A fellow used google maps to discover some ruins in his own back yard. while digging up the ruins, he comes across some cable, and tells his his neighbour "well there you have it, this proves that our ancient ancestors had internet".

    His neighbor replies "that's nothing, yesterday I used google to find some ruins in *my* backyard. When I dug them up, I didn't find ANY cable at all. That proves that our ancient ancestors had wireless".

  • Keyhole/Google Earth location file (Score:4, Informative)

    by jgaynor (205453) <<jon> <at> <gaynor.org>> on Friday September 16 2005, @09:10PM (#13582035) Homepage
    I made up a quick-n-dirty keyhole file of the place:

    http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jgaynor/random/slashdo t-09-16-05.kmz [rutgers.edu]

    For the paranoid, feel free to save it and then open it up from within Google Earth. For the rest of us just launch it directly.

  • Look at that resolution change! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by FooAtWFU (699187) on Friday September 16 2005, @11:02PM (#13582548) Homepage
    Just a little ways over to the east you can notice that the satellite resolution drops off precipitously. If the satellite had just switched off a few seconds earlier (or is it on a few sconds later?) I guess that this villa would have remained unfound.

    I'm also a little bitter because the satellite maps around where I live [google.com]

    are pretty lousy quality - and just a screen to the southwest, the resolution picks up again. Phooey.

    The other thing annoys me is that they don't pixelate the image when you zoom in, they just cut it off. Check around here [google.com], for instance. It would be nice to have the general diffuse pixellated background anyway, if only to get a rough idea of the terrain when you're in Overlay mode. Notice also that if you zoom out even one step you can't get the little side streets anymore. No-fun at all!

    • Re:Google Maps for future archeologists (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PsiPsiStar (95676) on Friday September 16 2005, @09:54PM (#13582237)
      ...Except that this digital info is not likely to survive quite as well as the stone buildings from 1000 years ago.

      Heck, even our VHS tapes wont be viewable by most people soon, but I can see the photos taken by my great grandparents.

      We're creating a history which is increasingly malleable and vulnerable to destruction.

      Technology is great, but tech wasn't meant to last or to be archived.

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