Technology

摘要

These days even Indiana Jones might think twice about packing his trusty trowel and theodolite for some fieldwork in southern Afghanistan. But guerrillas and foreign armies are no obstacle for archaeologists who are using Google Earth to identify hundreds of new sites. They have also drawn up plans of more than 45 known but previously unmapped sites.rnUntil recently, satellite images have been too expensive and variable for widespread use by archaeologists. Now Google Earth's freely available high-resolution images are helping David Thomas and colleagues at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, to forge ahead with a project called Archaeological Sites of Afghanistan in Google Earth, which catalogues details of 463 potential sites in the Registanrndesert.