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Want to find a lost tomb in Egypt? Follow the fractures October 25, 2006 Brian Jackson, DiscoveryChannel.ca
A geologist with a keen eye has spotted a way to track down undiscovered Egyptian tombs, according to a report released on Sunday.
Katarin A. Prizek is a geologist as well as a digital photography teacher. Her trained eye noticed something during a cruise down the Nile, towards the Valley of Kings.
"Many of the tombs were in zones of fracture concentration revealed by fracture traces and lineaments," says Parizek in a statement.
In 1964, Parizek's father discovered the same geological structures made for easier well-digging. It made sense to her that tomb builders - circa 1500 BC - would have chosen sites where it was easier to dig down through soft limestone.
Fracture traces are long, shallow ridges that are easily visible in an otherwise monotonous desert plain. They can be between two and 12 metres wide and stretch as long as two kilometres. They are indications of underlying rock fracture concentrations.
The most recent discovery (found last February) proves Egyptian tomb builders indeed knew what they were doing: The 63rd tomb found proved the correlation between fracture traces and tomb locations, says the report.
Tomb builders must have known the locations had less resistant rocks. They also placed tomb entrances in valley bottoms or receding cliff faces - places where crumbling stones would inevitably hide the tombs safely away from prying eyes.
That is, until Parizek's eyes recognized their strategy as the same one her father used 42 years ago to find water.
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