Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Century-old aerial photos help map an ancient Roman city's infrastructure. 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 Münster 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.
Archaeologist David and his colleagues (Søren Munch Kristiansen of Aarhus University's Center for Urban Network Evolutions, Achim Lichtenberger of Münster University, and Rubina Raja of Aarhus University's Center for Urban Network Evolutions) gathered aerial photos from the past century and examined them side by side with modern laser scans. This process let the researchers look for archaeological features and assess what had been damaged by the last 100 years of urban growth. It also showed where to focus future excavations and conservation efforts.
The survey revealed just how complex the city's long history had been and that people have been burying the old under the new for centuries here. A wall-like structure cuts across the Roman hippodrome, where the city’s ancient residents once gathered to watch horse and chariot races. Archaeologists have debated for years about the purpose of the division. But when Stott and his colleagues zoomed out to look at the aerial images, they were able to link the structure to a channel supplying water to fields to the southwest of the city.
And the channel, according to the archaeologists, was built long after the hippodrome had been repurposed as an industrial building under the Byzantine Empire and then a burial ground under the Umayyads. It seems to be built atop the whole history.
The study also revealed the complexities of the ancient city’s water system. The only perennial spring within the ancient city’s walls, Ain Kerawan, is situated down in the wadi-bed, where its water couldn’t reach more elevated parts of the city in the days before mechanical pumps. This meant the city’s survival relied on water brought in from further up the wadi or from springs in the surrounding hills, which required a complex network of cisterns, aqueducts, siphons, and channels carved by hand from the local rock.
“People should understand just how complex and sophisticated the engineering behind the Roman water management systems was in order to support a city of this size, and what an achievement of ingenuity and hard work it represents,” Stott told Ars.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Thursday May 31 2018, @09:24PM
"And what have the Romans ever done for us?"
"The aqueducts?"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 31 2018, @09:35PM (2 children)
> People should understand just how complex and sophisticated the engineering behind the Roman water management systems was
Wouldn't that be nice. But these days, the pendulum is swinging away from respect for education, facts, knowledge, and science. Hopefully it will stop well short of Khmer Rouge levels of idiocy, viciousness and war.
The Roman civilization could fall without imperiling the survival of humanity. Not sure ours could.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 01 2018, @03:25AM (1 child)
The Roman civilization could fall without imperiling the survival of humanity
You do realize that what filled the power void at that point was the Catholic Church[1]. Right?
TPTB went from crucifying people to burning them at the stake.
[1] At that point, the official religion of the empire.
...and the languages that most folks were speaking were based on Latin.
...and the legal systems were derived from Roman law.
It was more that it morphed rather than disappeared.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday June 01 2018, @12:59PM
How do you want to define "fall of a civilization"? A lot morphed, yes, but a lot was lost too. Of course the political system collapsed and Roman authority vanished in the West, even though Christianity and the Popes hung on. Latin wasn't completely eradicated but it definitely fell out of common use. One of the biggest losses was much of the engineering skills and knowledge. Concrete was not rediscovered until the 19th century, and today we're still discovering details about Roman concrete that has lead to improvements in our own. Another measure of loss is population decline. Though never completely abandoned and buried like the major cities of many older civilizations, the city of Rome went from 1 million to a low point of 40,000, and European population did not recover to Roman levels until near the end of the Middle Ages.
All that is a severe fall, perhaps exceeded only by the Bronze Age Collapse.