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Field and Lab: Aerial Photography

The bald spot in your back yard is an archeological clue, but don't read further unless you're willing to fly a mattress. On the photograph above, the ruins of the town the Bible calls Ai (see pp. 18-30, "Excavating Ai") are visible in the lower center. But how isolated was Ai? If you were called upon to identify a neighboring site for excavation, would anything on this photograph attract your attention? Biblical Archeologist posed this question to Edward Wingert, a cartographer and aerial photographer from the University of Honolulu. Dr. Wingert's answer is graphically presented on the following page. Legend has it that the first aerial photographs were taken in the American Civil War by a civilian watching a battle from a balloon. His photographs were mere souvenirs, but the military and cartographic usefulness of aerial photography quickly became apparent. By midcentury (remember Gary Powers and the U-2 affair), the techniques of aerial reconnaissance and "photogrammetric engineering" had become extraordinarily sophisticated.