Jordan's Airborne Monuments Men | God's World News

Jordan's Airborne Monuments Men

01/02/2017
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    Robert Bewley uses his radio headset to guide helicopter pilots to an archaeological site. (AP)
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    An aerial view shows destructive bulldozer tracks around an archaeological site in Jordan. (AP)
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    A helicopter view shows construction around a historic site. (AP)
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    Seen from a Jordanian Air Force helicopter, a two-lane road cuts through prehistoric stone circles. (AP)
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    Shaubak Castle is seen from an aircraft. It was built by the Crusaders in 1115. (AP)
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The helicopter door opens. Robert Bewley leans out, hundreds of feet above a Roman ruin near Amman, Jordan. The Oxford University archaeologist snaps photos as the chopper circles.

Sheep flock far below amid ruined marble columns. The helicopter banks toward another location.

Bewley and his colleague David Kennedy aim to preserve a multitude of archaeological sites across the Middle East and North Africa—if only in images. Many are not detectable from ground level. But with a bird’s-eye view and a camera lens, the pair have documented thousands in photographs.

"In an hour's flying, we can record between 10-20 sites, and once they're recorded through digital photography, that's a record that will last forever,” Bewley says.

Across the kingdom, Roman, Ottoman, Byzantine, Neolithic, and British imperial sites have been uncovered. Many are threatened by modern urban sprawl. Traffic from refugees fleeing wars in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria have also taken a toll. The destruction is clear from the air. But so is something else: 2,000 enormous man-made rock structures.

These weathered stones blended into the rocky landscape for millennia. Travelers walked right past them, says Kennedy. But the invention of flight revealed the ancient camouflaged structures. They are called “the works of the old men” in Jordan’s bleak basalt desert.

British pilots delivering mail between Cairo and Baghdad in the 1920s first noticed the formations contrasting with the pale desert floor. Not knowing what they were, the pilots nicknamed them “kites” after children’s drawings. They remained undocumented until 1997, when Kennedy and Bewley soared over with Nikon cameras.

Roughly 4,500 "kites" have since been found across the Fertile Crescent.

Their shapes—pennants, circles, fans—drew archaeologists to dig in Jordan's barren eastern desert. Researchers unearthed plant remains in former pool sites. They found animal bones. The evidence suggests the land was once full of life. The kite structures may have been massive hunting traps. It’s thought that people drove wild game herds between the stone walls. At the end, the stampeding animals dropped into six-foot-deep pits.

Bewley claims the aerial perspective, even in the age of Google Earth, leads to new discoveries. Oxford University research associate Andreas Zirbini agrees. He uses hi-resolution photos and GPS coordinates to identify quarries, wine presses, reservoirs, and tombs.

The Oxford group has built a database of sites. It offers 1,000 pages of photos at www.apaame.org. More than 6.6 million people use the online archive.

That’s Bewley’s goal. Not all sites can be physically maintained. But the photo archive can preserve the knowledge of research and discovery.

"The purpose of taking the photographs is that people will use them in the future,” he says.