Cold War spy planes photographed a lot more than Soviet military sites, including ancient buried ruins

It’s not that aerial archaeology is new, but that it is old.

Images taken from on high to observe what may be buried underground have been used by archaeologists for more than a century, and researchers at the Penn Museum have embraced the technology since at least the 1920s.

But no one has ever utilized the most famous trove of aerial images from the Cold War, those produced by high-flying U-2 spy planes, first deployed by the CIA to photograph all over the world beginning in 1956, a point documented in a small exhibit at the museum, “U-2 Spy Planes & Aerial Archaeology,” on view until the fall of 2023.

The exhibition, put together by Emily Hammer, assistant professor of archaeology and anthropology at Penn, and Jason Ur, professor of archaeology and ethnology at Harvard, documents the results of their painstaking labor, sifting through hundreds of rolls of declassified U-2 images from the Middle East, determining where the images were taken, what they showed and didn’t show, and isolating those that could be used and those that could not for one reason or another.

The work took about three years identifying and stitching images together into recognizable landscapes. None of the images had been indexed or identified by the government in any way — Hammer and Ur were essentially flying blind through the fog of the Cold War in the 1950s.

“Hundreds of U-2 missions took place all over the world, but we were only working with the Middle Eastern missions because that’s the part of the world where we work and that we know well,” said Hammer in a telephone interview. “You need to know the geography well in order to be able to figure out from these photographs where the plane flew. And not all of the Middle Eastern missions were declassified because the U.S. government doesn’t declassify images of Israel.”

Eventually, over three years, Hammer and her colleague identified, tracked, and indexed about a dozen missions, “a small piece of the archive,” she said.

Nowadays, archaeologists have access to multiple sources of post-U-2 aerial imagery — from drones to satellites and images from Google Earth.

But the U-2 spy images from the 1950s are unique in almost every way. Their resolution is very high, and, thanks to the Cold War hunger for surveillance, American spy planes flew everywhere in search of military installations and photographed everything, providing images of ancient archaeological features in the process.

Former President Bill Clinton declassified the trove in the mid-1990s. And then the images sat in the National Archives, virtually unused by researchers largely because there was so much, and it was all so anonymous. Hammer and Ur took a crack.

The U-2 images, and the images from early satellite programs, which Clinton also declassified. are invaluable, Hammer said. Not only do they show clear evidence of large archaeological landscape features — ancient roads, irrigation systems, the sprawl of ancient cities — but they also show the world of the 1950s, a less developed, less climate-brutalized, less manipulated landscape than the one visible today.

The world of Iraq in 1960, for instance, featured a different landscape than it does now — something that can be seen with the U-2 images of southern Iraq, which show an extensive marshland — not the desiccated flatland of today.

“It takes some training to see archaeological features in these images,” said Hammer. “But the main thing that you see in them is how people were living in the 1950s. There are ways of life that no longer exist today. One of those is the marsh way of life in southern Iraq. Iraq is mostly a desert, but the southern part of it used to be a massive marsh that seasonally flooded with the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. For thousands of years there were Arab populations that lived in the marshes.”

No longer. First Turkey, Syria, and Iran began damming the rivers for hydroelectric plants. Then Saddam Hussein retaliated against southern Iraqi Muslims for their support of Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Saddam drained the marshes in the early 1990s.

“People’s way of life was just totally destroyed,” said Hammer.

“People have now spent several decades living in cities, they’re not going to return to ... hunting waterfowl and fishing, and herding animals,” she said. But in the U-2 spy photos, it’s all there.

“We can see all of the things that they were doing and how they were living in the marshes in the 1950s,” she said. Indeed one section of the exhibition amounts to a case study on this rapid transformation and the consequent obliteration “of an intangible cultural heritage that no longer exists.”

Two other sections of the exhibition focus on more ancient landscape features, difficult to see by someone digging a small hole in the desert. One exhibit section explores expansive stone features called “desert kites” — traps for making mass kills of herded animals.

The kites must have been vicious killing pens when they were erected in southern Jordan maybe 9,000 or 10,000 years ago. But captured by the U-2 cameras from 70,000 feet in the air in 1960, they have a delicate otherworldly beauty, great roundish heads outlined by stone, and long spindly stone legs trailing away.

“They’re really beautiful,” said Hammer. “They’re these massive stone constructions that are hundreds of meters long and were designed to trap herds of gazelles. When you look at them from an aerial perspective, they look like a child’s kite, which is why they’re called desert kites.”

The exhibition also focuses a bit on the city of Ur. Hammer has spent time at Ur.

The U-2 photos suggest that Ur was once much larger with the Euphrates River flowing near the city.

That was then.

Now, several millennia down the road, Ur is “located in the middle of a steppe desert,” Hammer said. The Euphrates River has “shifted course dramatically through thousands of years.” she said. The U-2 images show the old channels of the river and its proximity to the city, facilitating discussion of Sumerian water delivery, she said.

As dramatic as the U-2 images may be, they still must be verified on the ground.

“You need to look to see, is there architecture there?” she said. “Are there pottery shards and other artifacts visible on the surface that are indicative of settlements having been there in the past? And also we needed to check the traces of the of the former courses of the Euphrates River.”

Did it check out?

“When I worked at Ur in 2017 and 2019, we were able to confirm” it all, she said.