ARCE-ISAC Joint Lecture: Using Declassified U-2 Spy Photos for a Remote Archaeological Survey in Egypt

During the height of the Cold War, the United States flew a series of reconnaissance missions using U-2 spy planes over Egypt. Film negatives from two flights that cover much of the Nile Valley and Nile Delta from 1959 have 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 Toronto-Brown U2Egypt Aerial Photography Project to digitize this imagery from the National Archives and Records Administration and make these photographs publicly available to all interested researchers. Beyond this, I will showcase the results of our ongoing remote survey of Beheira Governorate using U-2 imagery, highlighting how this imagery gives us a unique window onto a landscape that has changed significantly over the last 5 decades. The talk will close by looking at how this compares to other satellite imagery and aerial photography and highlight the potential of this dataset for future archaeological research.

Oren Siegel is an assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology (CLTA) at University of Toronto. He co-directs the U2Egypt Aerial Photography Project with Laurel Bestock (Brown University) and the Kom Firin Archaeological Project with Luiza Silva (UC Irvine). He completed his BA in Egyptology at Brown University in 2011 and his MA (2013) and PhD (2020) in Egyptian Archaeology at University of Chicago. He has had the privilege of excavating at field projects in Mendes, Edfu, Dendara, Uronarti, and Aswan. Oren’s research focuses on boundaries and border-making in the ancient Egyptian world, urbanism in Pharaonic Egypt, and landscape archaeology. He is working on completing a forthcoming monograph based on his dissertation work on the importance of monumental walling projects in ancient Egyptian society.

This lecture is organized by ARCE Chicago, a chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt.