Thursday, February 25, 2021 at 7:00 pm MST Via Zoom

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Dr. Emily Hammer’s U2 Spy Plane Photos and Archaeology in the Middle East, lecture will need to be rescheduled. Instead, please join us for the following lecture:

The Lost City of Sikyon
Dr. Sarah James, CU Classics

Sikyon is probably the most important ancient Greek city that you’ve never heard of. Known for centuries only from brief mentions in Classical literature, intensive archaeological work began here in the late 1990s by Greek and Danish teams. Thanks to their efforts, the secrets of this large and prosperous city have been slowly revealed and enable Sikyon and its ancient past to be reconstructed in surprising and impressive ways. (Sponsored by the AIA and the CU Department of Classics.)


The following lecture will be rescheduled at a later time:

U2 Spy Plane Photos and Archaeology in the Middle East by Dr. Emily Hammer

Declassified military imagery from planes and satellites plays an important role in landscape and environmental archaeology. Historic imagery sources, especially the large archives generated by the US during the Cold War, are far better than Google Earth for providing archaeologists with a window into the past, before development and intensive agriculture took hold in many rural parts of western Asia. In the mid-late 1990s, the archaeology of arid regions in Eurasia was revolutionized by the declassification of CORONA “spy satellite” photographs showing large swaths of the region in high-resolution, as they appeared in 1967-1972. Now there is a new source of even older high-resolution historical imagery: photos from U2 spy planes captured 1958-1960. In this lecture, Dr. Emily Hammer presents case studies showing how U2 photos can be used to shape archaeological and historical conclusions about early southwest Asia. These new datasets allow for a better understanding of the environmental distribution of prehistoric hunting traps (“desert kites”) in eastern Jordan, the size of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur in southern Iraq and this city’s ancient water supplies, as well as the spatial demography of 20th-century communities living around the marshes of southern Iraq.

This program is sponsored by AIA Boulder, CU Classics Department and the CU Museum of Natural History.