The Cold War was especially a time of psychosis. The fear of nuclear weapons raised the tension of any conflict to stratospheric levels. So the two blocks were always aware of each other. It is not surprising that, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first spy satellite.
Sputnik1 weighed approximately 83 kilos and measured just 23 centimeters in diameter. Its objective, detect radio signals and transmit them to Earth. It was the beginning of a technological race to control every movement of the enemy to the millimeter and that, in the end, cemented the world in which we now live.
Spy satellites proliferated uncontrollably. Hundreds of ships were launched into space and the information they collected is still used today to, for example, show the consequences of climate change. Now, a group of researchers from Dartmouth College in the United States has recovered declassified images that were taken in the 1960s and 1970s to discover hundreds of unknown Roman forts.
Experts have compared the photographs to reassess one of the first aerial archaeological surveys in history, published by Father Antoine Poidebard in 1934, which revealed 396 new fortresses in what is now Syria and Iraq, on the eastern border of the Roman Empire. which were believed to be a defensive line to protect the eastern provinces from Arab and Persian raids.
"Since the 1930s, historians and archaeologists have debated the strategic or political purpose of this system of fortifications," says Professor Jesse Casana, lead author of the article published in the journal Antiquity. "But few questioned Poidebard's basic observation that there was a line of forts defining the eastern Roman border," he adds.
To address this point, Casana and his team used declassified images “that were part of the world's first spy satellite programs.” "They preserve a high-resolution perspective of a landscape that has been severely affected by modern land-use changes," she says.
Using the forts found by Poidebard as a reference point, the team was able to identify 396 more. They were widely distributed across the region, from east to west, which does not support the argument that the forts constituted a north-south border wall.
Researchers hypothesize that these enclaves were actually built to support interregional trade, protect caravans traveling between the eastern provinces and non-Roman territories, and facilitate communication between east and west.
“Importantly, this indicates that the borders of the Roman world were defined in a less rigid and exclusive way than previously believed. It is simply that the Roman eastern border was probably not a place of constant violent conflict,” they point out.
The Romans were a military society, but they clearly valued trade and communication with regions not under their direct control. As such, this discovery could have key implications for understanding life on the Roman frontiers.
“We were only able to safely identify archaeological remains in 38 of the 116 forts of Poidebard,” says Professor Casana. "In addition, many of the probable Roman fortresses we have documented in this study have already been destroyed by recent urban or agricultural development, and many others are under extreme threat," he adds.
This means that in less than 100 years since Poidebard's aerial survey, a large number of Roman forts and other archaeological sites have been lost due to urban development and intensified agriculture. This makes large-scale recording of archaeological landscapes especially vital for heritage preservation.
As more declassified images become available, such as photographs taken by the Lockheed U-2 spy plane, researchers believe new archaeological discoveries could be made. According to Professor Casana, “careful analysis of this powerful data holds enormous potential for future discoveries in the Middle East and beyond.”
