US satellites discover more archaeological sites

Monitoring Desk

KABUL:  The US government satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles have discovered more archaeological sites in Afghanistan dating to sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it has been reported.

According to a report published in Science Magazine, the researchers are using images taken by commercial and United States government satellites and military drones to look for archaeological sites in areas of Afghanistan that are too dangerous for fieldwork.

The report further states that the new discoveries, the team members have identified 119 caravanserais dating to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

According to the magazine, these vast mudbrick buildings, which each had room to shelter hundreds of travelers and thousands of camels, lined routes linking Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Empire, located in what is now Iran, and the Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent.

It had been thought that land travel declined after the Portuguese developed trade routes across the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century. “But this shows a huge infrastructure investment of the Safavids a century later,” said Kathryn Franklin of the University of Chicago.

This comes as the Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership funded by the US Department of State has tripled the number of recorded archaeological features in Afghanistan to more than 4,500.