Google Earth helped discover nearly 2,000 archaeological sites

Nearly two thousand potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia are open from an office chair in Australia thanks to high-quality satellite imagery from Google Earth.

David Kennedy from the University of Western Australia has never been to Saudi Arabia. Instead, he explored 1,240 square kilometers in Saudi Arabia using Google Earth. Thus, he found 1977 potential archaeological sites.

Kennedy confirmed that the objects were just traces of ancient life, and not random vegetation or shadow on the images - asking a non-archeologist friend from Saudi Arabia to go to several objects and take a picture of them.

According to Kennedy, aerial photographs of Saudi Arabia are inaccessible to most archaeologists, and flying over the country is difficult to organize, if not impossible. In this case, Google Earth was a great way out.