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The newly revealed structure consists of a 184-by-161-foot (about 56-by-49-meter) platform that encloses a slightly smaller platform originally paved with flagstones. The east side of the interior platform had been lined with a row of columns that once crowned a monumental staircase. A small 28-by-28-foot (8.5-by-8.5-meter) building was centered north-south atop the interior platform and opened to the east, facing the staircase. This enormous open platform, topped with a relatively small building and approached by a monumental facade, has no known parallels to any other structure in Petra. It most likely had a public, ceremonial function, which may make it...

An overhead image of the monument photographed from a drone, and a detail overlay of the surface features in which the image is rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Photograph by I. LaBianca (Left) and Photograph by I. LaBianca; graphics by J. Blanzy (Right) ============================================================================================== Satellites and drones helped reveal huge ceremonial platform near the ancient city’s center. An enormous monument has been hiding in plain sight at the World Heritage site of Petra, according to a study recently published in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Archaeologists Sarah Parcak, a National Geographic fellow, and Christopher Tuttle, executive director...

A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence of a long-elusive prize in archaeology — a second Norse settlement in North America, further south than ever known.

Middle Kingdom rock-cut tomb discovered in El-Lisht. The Egyptian-American mission directed by Mohamed Youssef (Dahshur antiquities director) and Dr. Sarah Parcak (University of Alabama) discovered a Middle Kingdom tomb in El-Lisht to the south of Senusret I pyramid. "The mission has been working on documenting and preserving the result of illicit digs which took place after 25th of January 2011 turmoil." Dr. Mamdouh El-Damaty, Minister of Antiquities, told Luxor Times. The discovered tomb belongs to a High official dated to 12th Dynasty at the reign of Senusret I. The tomb owner held the title "Royal seal bearer". The mission will...

Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt. More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings. Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids. The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak. satellite image of pyramid An infra-red satellite image shows a buried pyramid, located in the centre of the highlight box. She says she was amazed at how much she and her team has...

Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt. More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings. Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids. The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama in Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak. She says she was amazed at how much she and her team has found. "We were very intensely doing this research for over a year. I could see the data as it was...

Satellites hovering above Egypt have zoomed in on a 1,600-year-old metropolis, archaeologists say. Images captured from space pinpoint telltale signs of previous habitation in the swatch of land 200 miles south of Cairo, which digging recently confirmed as an ancient settlement dating from about 400 A.D. The find is part of a larger project aiming to map as much of ancient Egypt's archaeological sites, or "tells," as possible before they are destroyed or covered by modern development. "It is the biggest site discovered so far," said project leader Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "Based on the...

Seventeen lost pyramids are believed to have been found in Egypt by a team of space archaeologists from Alabama, according to a report. Sarah Parcak and her team at a NASA-sponsored laboratory at the University of Alabama at Birmingham made the discoveries using a satellite survey, and also found more than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements in infrared images that show up buildings underground, BBC News reported. The BBC said that two of the suspected pyramids had been confirmed by initial excavations. "We were very intensely doing this research for over a year. I could see the data as...

Space: The Final [Archaeological] Frontier Volume 57 Number 6, November/December 2004 by P.J. Capelotti Illustrations by James Jean Summer 2205 During a preliminary survey of late twenty-first-century mining outposts in the asteroid belt, Dr. Gan Shishu, director of the Institute for Space Archaeology at the China National Space Administration, recognized a unique opportunity. Leaving her field team as they continued to document the massive Halliburton gantry on asteroid Q36, she piloted her team's one-person archaeoprobe L.S.B. Leakey toward a strange-looking artifact nearby that had been drifting in heliocentric orbit for more than two centuries. Science fiction? Not any longer....

On the twentieth of January 1963 the big gun roared for the first time as it fired its first test shot into the clear blue sky. This was the first time in history that a gun of this calibre had been fired at an angle of near vertical. From a cloud of flames and smoke a 315 kg test slug was hurtled into the air. With a launch velocity of 1000 m/s and a flight time of about 58 seconds the wooden slug rose to an altitude of 3000 meters before coming down a kilometre off shore. On 21 January...