Daily News | Cold War spy planes photographed a lot more than Soviet military sites, including ancient buried ruins
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 theBut 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.
“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.
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.
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. “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.”
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