By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Home to the Valley of the Kings, storied burial ground of the Pharaohs, Egypt's ancient necropolis of Thebes is yielding its secrets to the most modern of technologies: high-resolution satellite photos.

"Welcome to the 21st century," says Egyptologist Peter Piccione of the College of Charleston (S.C.). "We've found a new way to look at old tombs."

These photos are one more way archaeological riddles are increasingly yielding to modern technology. Investigators also are using CT scans of mummies and loading three-dimensional views of cuneiform texts onto the Internet.

Since the 1920s, archaeologists have been looking for insights into the lives of the ancients by exploring the tombs of the Theban necropolis, where Egyptian rulers, priests and their servants were entombed from roughly 2,300 B.C. to 30 B.C. Since 1978, the Theban Mapping Project based at the American University in Cairo, for example, has used aerial photos to map the necropolis and related sites, as well as nearby temples and palaces at Luxor and Karnak.

Piccione is looking to complement that effort, using high-resolution satellite photos, able to resolve features as small as 2 feet across. The images, only available commercially within the past two years, can't look under the earth to find tombs but can spot entrances and, more important, feed the information onto a Web site so scholars can search and locate clusters of tombs complete with descriptions and geologic data.
Announced in September, the team's geographic information system, or GIS, has mapped and cataloged 514 tombs on the hill of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna.

Thebes was the capital of ancient Egypt at the height of Egyptian power. Outside the city is the necropolis, a collection of thousands of tombs. By finely mapping the location of many tombs, archaeologists can ask new questions about ancient Egyptian burial practices, Piccione says.
Some hillsides are completely carved away by tombs, for example. "Why? Certain people wanted (burial site) views of the valley below," Piccione says.

The map shows that servants of Pharaoh Thutmose III craved tombs looking down on a temple sacred to the ruler. They also sought to place their burial site on a line between the temple and the ruler's tomb for luck.
"Considering the Egyptians were using ropes and sticks and eyeballing it, they were really great at placing tombs," Piccione says.

More broadly, the team hopes that studying the strata of hillside rock will give clues about the status of those buried there. Sometimes, the best rock was at the bottom of the hill. Determining where high-status burials took place may define where to concentrate efforts.

Widely used by civil servants, GIS systems layer information about a place into databases that can be used for purposes ranging from plotting new roads to detecting crime waves.
"I would say that GIS is much more than a trend" for researchers, says geographer Dan Blumberg of Israel's Ben-Gurion University. He says it's a "breakthrough" not only for archaeology, but geology, oceanography and even medicine. Blumberg, who heads the Israel Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, is part of an archaeological team examining the use of radar satellite data to detect buried man-made objects. And in Jordan, satellite data has mapped the entire country for archaeologists, reports Stephen Savage of Arizona State University in the current American Journal of Archaeology.

One added benefit involves putting geographic information online. Once there, researchers worldwide can then test their own theories about a site, sharing a common set of data on which to base arguments. And researchers should be able to look across cultures more easily someday, comparing sites located at disparate locales with far more ease than is possible today.

"The availability of GIS tools and satellite data will certainly broaden the understanding of past cultures and improve the transparency of data shared between scientists within and around the discipline of archaeology," Blumberg says.