Decades of aerial photos reveal how an ancient desert city got its water

Enlarge (credit: Bernard Gagnon via Wikimedia Commons)

By combining old and new aerial images, archaeologists are getting a new look at the complexities of supplying water to an ancient desert city.

In northern Jordan, along a wadi once called the Golden River, the ancient city of Jerash sits uneasily alongside its modern namesake. With its columned temples, Roman forum, and other monuments, it's one of Jordan's biggest tourist attractions and a key to the region's long, complex history. But the expansion of modern Jerash is slowly destroying what remains of the old city.

Recently, a team of archaeologists from Aarhus University and Mi1/4nster University combined historical aerial images with modern, laser-scanning surveys to map those changes and get a big-picture view of the ancient city. Previous archaeological work at Jerash has mostly focused on individual sites or on standing monumental architecture rather than more subtle or mundane aspects of city life, even though the latter is what kept its residents alive. Comparing modern laser scans with aerial photos spanning the last century let the researchers identify what has been lost, discover which sites are most at risk, and make connections between features that might have been much harder to recognize from the ground.

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