Old Sites, New Images: U-2 Aerial Photography of Egypt

The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA Toronto society) and the Archaeology Centre present: “Old Sites, New Images: U-2 Aerial Photography of Egypt,”. 

During the height of the Cold War, the United States flew a series of reconnaissance missions using U-2 spy planes over Egypt. The film negatives from two flights that cover much of the Nile Valley and Nile Delta from 1959 has recently been declassified, and the resulting imagery is both earlier and higher resolution than publicly available CORONA satellite imagery. This talk will discuss the ongoing work by the Brown-Toronto U2 Aerial Photography of Egypt Project to digitize this imagery from the National Archives and Records Administration as well as our team's efforts to make these photographs publicly available to all interested researchers. Beyond this, I will show some preliminary photos that showcase the potential of this dataset to contribute to future survey efforts, especially in the Nile Delta.

Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/s/89759871075