An archaeologist using Google Earth has spotted the traces of three Roman military camps in the southern Jordanian desert, prompting a rethink of the region's history.
Three ancient Roman camps in the Jordanian desert, possibly built during a secret military mission in the second century A.D., have been discovered by an archaeologist using satellite images from Google Earth.
Study lead author Michael Fradley , a landscape archaeologist at the University of Oxford, told Live Science that a wall of one camp had at some point been recorded on a Jordanian heritage register."But there'd been no interpretation of it as a Roman camp," he said.Eye in the skyFradley works with a project called Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa to analyze satellite photographs, and Google Earth is among its sources.
Further investigations with Google Earth and from aerial photographs suggest that the outlines are the distinctive remains of temporary Roman military camps, built by soldiers following a standard defensive plan — in these cases, by piling up rocks. The line of camps seems to be heading for the Nabataean city of Dumat al-Jandal, which is now in Saudi Arabia. But the usual approach to the city would have been through a dry valley farther north called Wadi Sirhan; Fradley speculated that the camps were part of a secret Roman mission to attack from an unexpected quarter.
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