About

The U2 aerial photography is both earlier in date and of significantly higher resolution than the later CORONA imagery from the 1960s.¹ Although the U2 imagery does not provide comprehensive coverage of the surrounding deserts, it does offer high resolution views of both well-known archaeological sites like and Karnak and Tell Edfu together with excellent imagery of the Nile Valley and Nile Delta — many areas of which have been less comprehensively surveyed. Given the relatively early date of the imagery there is excellent potential for site discovery and heritage mapping — these images provide an invaluable view of a landscape prior to the extensive expansion of agriculture and urban development in Egypt that, over the past six decades, has significantly altered the ability to see earlier material remains. For those archaeologists interested in landscape studies or tracing settlement patterns, these aerial photos have significant potential to offer valuable insights. We anticipate that the U2 imagery should also prove a valuable tool for researchers seeking to identify damaged or threatened cultural heritage sites—indeed many sites may no longer be accessible outside of these images. Our aim is to digitize these images and make them publicly available to any interested researchers and the general public. If successful, the project would likely support a variety of research efforts across and beyond the Egyptological community—including for our own students who will ideally aid in the processing and georeferencing of the imagery.

The declassified U2 negatives are kept in cold-storage in Lanexa, Kansas, and we will need to order them to be shipped to the National Archives and Records Administration II building in College Park, Maryland. Proof of concept for this has already been demonstrated by Jason Ur and Emily Hammer, but they were unable to photograph or digitize the imagery from the two U2 flights surveying Egypt. At the NARA II building, we will use SLR cameras equipped with a macro-lens to document each negative at 100% scale and the images will be stitched together. Given the size of the negatives, we anticipate mounting the camera on a tripod standing on a wheeled dolly in order to quickly take the necessary photographs. Once we have the images, we will use the “photomerge” tools in Adobe Photoshop (or comparable applications) in order to stitch our individual photographs together in order to obtain a complete image of the original photographic negative. These images will in turn be georeferenced in QGIS or ArcGIS.