Using radar images acquired by the Space Shuttle Endeavour, a team of University of Edinburgh researchers reports it has pinpointed a network of medieval roads crisscrossing the Scottish island of Islay.
The roads, which may link castles, mines and ports on the island, could provide further insight into its early medieval past, when Viking invaders known as the Lords of the Isles controlled much of the Irish Sea.
Gary McKay, a former NASA scientist who now works in the University of Edinburgh's departments of geography and archeology, said he made the discovery while poring over the radar data acquired during two separate shuttle missions in 1994.
"As soon as we had processed the image, it was so obvious that something odd was present. At first I thought it was just a natural river course, but then realized that this 'river' ran up and over hills, completely ignoring the local geological structure," McKay said. "It just had to be artificial."
The discovery, which Professor of Environmental Archeology Geraint Coles said needs further confirmation through extensive groundwork, would not be the first to be made using remote sensing data acquired from space.
Landsat and shuttle images helped archeologists locate the lost city of Ubar in Oman. Other detailed radar images have contributed to the study of everything from ruins in the jungles of Cambodia to sites in Spain.
"The radar data gives us an idea of where to look, but not too much information directly," Coles said. "It's not going to replace the need to work on the ground."
The use of remote sensing in archeology will receive a strong shot in the arm come January 13 of next year, when the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission is launched aboard STS-99.
The 11-day, $220-million mission will use radar to map 80 percent of the globe's landmass to create the highest-resolution digital database of the planet ever assembled.
"We literally have better maps of Venus than we do of Earth," said Michael Kobrick, the SRTM's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The combined U.S.-Italian-German mission will produce an estimated 9 terabytes of information about the Earth's topography. By comparison, the contents of the U.S. Library of Congress amount to the equivalent of 12 terabytes.
Although the information will be used mostly for military purposes, mapmaking and to globally monitor everything from earthquakes to volcanic activity, it is expected to be a boon for archeologists as well.
"In my opinion, it is going to be a real gold mine, especially if you are an archeologist," Kobrick said. "If you're interested in an area, you can go to the library, pop in a CD-ROM and look it up."
The SRTM project data will take from a year to 18 months to process and release. It will image objects down to 99 feet across (30 meters).
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