Antoine Poidebard was a Jesuit priest, military officer, and the pioneer of aerial archaeology in the French-speaking world. He was also a spy: a key informant for the French intelligence services during France’s mandate over Syria, the period of colonial rule that lasted from just after the first world war (when the modern state of Syria was detached from the Ottoman empire) to just after the second (when it became independent). He theorised how the colonial power could exploit the mass displacement that had taken place in the Middle East during and after the First World War. France, he argued, could stabilize its imperial frontier in the Syrian desert by settling Christian populations displaced from elsewhere along the newly-drawn borders of the mandate territories. Frontiers were also the concern of his archaeological research. Flying over thousands of square kilometres of the Syrian steppe, Poidebard and military aviators photographed hundreds of archaeological sites that were difficult if not impossible to identify from the ground. These, he believed, were the trace of Rome in the Syrian desert: the network of fortified garrisons that allowed the Roman empire to defend itself against invasion from the east. His 1934 book on the subject, La Trace de Rome dans le désert de Syrie, was the first major work of aerial archaeology in French, recognised internationally as a landmark in Roman history and an advance in archaeological methods. His work illustrates the close connection between aerial archaeology and military surveillance that continues today.
Poidebard was an agent and intellectual of French colonial rule, which was established by violent occupation in 1920 and reasserted at the cost of many thousands of Syrian lives in 1925-27, when a widespread anticolonial revolt was bloodily repressed. As a trained aerial observer, he participated in the campaign of bombardment that helped end that revolt (though it also took up to 70,000 troops on the ground). As an archaeologist, he was a methodological innovator who transposed new techniques of military reconnaissance into civilian scientific practice and used them to explore a historical question of great relevance to colonial rule: how an empire could control a frontier in the debatable lands of the Syrian steppe. There was no practical distance between Poidebard’s archaeological research and the 39th Aerial Observation Regiment’s other survey work on the imperial frontier.
Historians of archaeology are understandably intrigued by Poidebard. Daniela Helbig has argued that for him, revealing the ancient past hidden under the desert’s thin soil not only claimed that past for France – ‘the ancient Roman border as the spatial extension of a Western, civilised world into a savage East’ (297) – but also staked a claim to the future: one in which France’s mandate would persist indefinitely, and the perspectives opened up by his photographs would be investigated by French archaeologists working on the ground. But the mandate’s tight budget for everything except military repression meant that little funding was available for archaeological excavations. Shaken by the second world war, French rule in Syria would end only twelve years after Poidebard’s book came out. Sarah Griswold has suggested that it is no coincidence that Poidebard developed this new technique in Syria, where France always struggled to exert effective control. Aerial archaeology was not a prelude to groundwork but a substitute for it: the terrain was too remote, its inhabitants too (justifiably) hostile, and French resources too limited. In this, she argues, aerial archaeology in the mandate territories was an early example of the shift from colonial to postcolonial science. Colonial powers might lose control over the land and peoples of the formerly colonized world, but colonial scientists would adopt techniques and perspectives that kept scientific expertise in their own hands. Formerly colonized lands and peoples would still be the objects of someone else’s research, not the subjects of their own.
Archaeologists remain interested in Poidebard too. In 2023, an article published in the prestigious archaeological journal Antiquity revisited his thesis using a different body of photographic evidence: declassified imagery from the first US spy satellite programme with near-global reach, CORONA. Satellites, unlike spy planes, could not be shot down, as happened to an American U-2 in Soviet airspace in May 1960. Putting satellites into low earth orbit, capturing good quality images, and (not least) recovering the exposed film from space posed formidable technical problems. But the Eisenhower-era military-industrial complex relished problems like these, and the enormous budgetary appropriations they generated. Through the 1960s, a series of CORONA satellites gathered imagery of America’s real or potential adversaries. By the time the programme was superseded by the more reliable and higher-resolution HEXAGON in the early 1970s, it had successfully returned around 800,000 frames, covering millions of square kilometres of the earth’s surface. Eastern Europe and the Middle East were among the most-covered regions.
The CORONA imagery has become a major resource for archaeologists. It was declassified in 1995 by Bill Clinton, after lobbying from the then-secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Robert McCormick Adams, himself an archaeologist of Mesopotamia. Once digitized and orthorectified (that is, corrected for the spatial distortion produced by the panoramic lenses of the camera, the curvature of the earth, and other factors), the relatively high-resolution photographs can be used to identify and locate archaeological sites on a previously impossible scale. The later CORONA photographs were taken in stereo, with two cameras producing overlapping images of the same area from slightly different angles, like our own binocular vision. These can be used to produce three-dimensional reconstructions of the landscape as it existed before the late twentieth-century development processes – agricultural intensification, urbanization, reservoir construction and so on – that have now disturbed, destroyed, or submerged countless thousands of sites. One of the authors of the Antiquity article, Jesse Casana, has been a key figure in archaeology’s adoption of the CORONA imagery, winning large grants to produce a searchable atlas of it. Collaborating with numerous colleagues, he has used it to advance archaeological research on his own period and region of specialization (the ancient Near East) and many others. The Antiquity article uses CORONA imagery, supplemented by more recently declassified HEXAGON imagery, to identify a larger number of forts in the Syrian steppe than Poidebard was able to, spreading east-west rather than north-south. These, it argues, served not as a border wall but as a network supporting ‘a system of caravan-based interregional trade, communication and military transport’.
The article may revisit Poidebard’s thesis, but it doesn’t reflect on the colonial context, or content, of his work. It treats his photographs as artefacts devoid of politics, that simply reveal the past of archaeological practice, just as for Poidebard they simply revealed the ancient past. And there’s a striking parallel in the way it treats the CORONA images: as artefacts devoid of politics, waiting to be picked up and orthorectified to provide a window onto the ancient past as it appeared from low earth orbit in the 1960s. Beyond a quick reference to the cold war context that takes for granted America’s need to gather ‘intelligence’, there is no effort to understand CORONA as a global surveillance programme created by an imperial power which in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first would dominate the Middle East much more comprehensively than France ever managed to. Nor is there any reflection on what it means for an archaeologist to adopt the perspective of a spy satellite, a perspective far removed from the territory it envisions and implicitly hostile to the people living on it. The authors cite Sarah Griswold’s article for facts about Poidebard, but they don’t seem to have registered its actual argument, or understood how fully it applies to them. Poidebard, at least, knew that he was an agent of empire.
Archaeology as a discipline does not lack critical self-reflection on what it means to do research from the perspective of the drone operator, the bomber, or the spy satellite. Towards the end of a recent chapter on archaeology and remote sensing in the Handbook of Archaeological Sciences (hyperlink), Casana himself gestures at some of the ethical issues. The works of scholars he cites, like Susan Pollock and Reinhard Beinbeck, or others that he doesn’t, like Lynn Meskell or Ömür Harmanşah, might suggest considerably more caution in using declassified spy satellite imagery as an archaeological resource. One of Casana’s earlier co-authored articles about the usefulness of this material borrowed a biblical reference for its title, ‘Swords into ploughshares’, but didn’t discuss the shift from military to civilian use that this implies. You might ask whether what has taken place is a civilianisation of military images or a (re)militarization of archaeology.