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

This is a fascinating niche lecture for anyone interested in archaeology, Cold War history, or aerial photography. Oren Siegel, an assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of Toronto, presents the work of the Toronto-Brown U2Egypt Aerial Photography Project, which is digitizing recently declassified U-2 spy plane film negatives from 1959 flights over Egypt. The resulting imagery offers higher resolution than the publicly available CORONA satellite imagery, providing a unique window onto the Nile Valley and Delta landscape as it was over five decades ago. The talk on Saturday, October 3, from 5:00 to 6:00 PM at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, will showcase the project's remote survey of Beheira Governorate and discuss the dataset's potential for future research.