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Over the past 25 years, CORONA satellite imagery has become an integral part of archaeological research, especially for arid, sparsely vegetated regions such as the Middle East. Since 2020, a new archive of satellite imagery gathered by the US spy satellite programme that succeeded CORONA—HEXAGON—has become widely available for download via the United States Geological Survey. This photographic archive has enormous potential for archaeological research. Here, the authors seek to lower the barriers to accessing and using this imagery by detailing the background, technical specifications and history of the HEXAGON archive. Four case studies illustrate the benefits and limitations of HEXAGON imagery for archaeological and historical research in the Middle East and beyond.
Excavation and systematic surface collection since 1999 have revealed the outlines of a unique site in Northern Mesopotamia. Khirbat al-Fakhar is an extensive settlement of 300 ha, primarily occupied during the LC 1-2 periods (ca 4400-3800 cal . BC). Systematic surface collection , satellite imagery analysis , and targeted excavation allow a preliminary characterization of its settlement , in particular the abundance of evidence for intensive obsidian manufacture. This unexpectedly large and early settlement presents problems of demography , nature of sedentism, permanence of occupation, and obsidian manufacture and trade. In this article we discuss these issues in the light of current accounts of the development of societal complexity and urbanism in the region and argue that Khirbat al-Fakhar had characteristics of both villages and cities, qualifying it as proto-urban.
Tell Hamoukar is one of the largest Bronze Age sites in northern Mesopotamia. The present volume presents the results of three seasons of field survey and remote-sensing analysis at the site and its region. These studies were undertaken to address questions of urban origins, land use, and demographic trends through time. Site descriptions and settlement histories are presented for Hamoukar and fifty-nine other sites in its immediate hinterland over the last 8,000 years. The project paid close attention to the "off-site" landscape between sites and considered aspects of agricultural practices, land tenure, and patterns of movement. For each phase of occupation, the patterns of settlement and land use are contextualized within larger patterns of Mesopotamian history, with particular attention to the proto-urban fifth millennium B.C., the Uruk Expansion of the fourth millennium BC, the height of urbanism in the late third millennium, the impact of the Assyrian empire in the early first millennium BC, and the Abbasid landscape of the late first millennium AD.
The volume also includes a description of the unparalleled landscape of tracks in the Upper Khabur basin of Hassake province, northeastern Syria. Through analysis of CORONA satellite photographs, over 6,000 kilometers of premodern trackways were identified and mapped, mostly dating to the late third millennium and early Islamic periods. This area of northern Mesopotamia is thus one of the best-preserved ancient landscapes of movement in the world.
The volume's appendices describe the sixty sites, their surface assemblages, and the survey's ceramic typology.