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Drones Revealed a 3,000-Year-Old Mega-Fortress in the Mountains

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Image Name: A 3,000-Year-Old Mega-Fortress

Image Credit: independent

Researchers have found a large 3,000-year-old fortification in the South Caucasus mountains in a ground-breaking find highlighting the might of contemporary technologies. Thanks to creative drone mapping methods and years of painstaking research, this Bronze Age site—known as Dmanisis Gora—has been determined to be among the biggest defenses of its time in the area.

A Secret Promontory Exposed
Researchers investigating a fortified promontory tucked between two deep gorges in the Caucasus Mountains—a territory acting as a link between Europe and Asia—started the path to find Dmanisis Gora in 2018. Though the site’s magnitude was too large for traditional mapping techniques, initial results showed traces of stone buildings and dual-layered fortress walls.

A team headed by Cranfield University looked into drone technology to meet this obstacle. The site was photographed astonishingly 11,000 times using aircraft surveys. Advanced software then stitches these images together to produce high-resolution digital elevation models and orthophotos, finely detailed composite images with a bird’s-eye perspective of the area.

“This method lets us precisely map the whole site, recording its features in ways not possible from the ground,” said senior archaeologist Nathaniel Erb-Satullo of the Cranfield Forensic Institute.

Graphically mapping a megastructure
Published in the journal Antiquity, the results showed that Dmanisis Gora was significantly larger than first calculated. Covering an area more than forty times the size of what scientists had first believed, the site boasts a long defensive wall spanning more than half a mile. The size and complexity of the fortification provide settlement patterns in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages with a fresh perspective.

All within the outer settlement, the drone images also caught a network of buildings comprising stone buildings, field systems, and burials. This extensive mapping project brought attention to the variety and complexity of the settlement, which might greatly affect current population aggregation models in Eurasia.

Combining Modern Technology with Past
First published in 2013, the researchers contrasted drone-generated maps with declassified Cold War-era spy satellite photographs of the area to deepen their investigation. This mix of old and new technologies provided special insights into the evolution of the settlement across millennia.

Erb-Satullo remarked, “The use of drones has transformed our ability to document and understand the significance of archeological sites like Dmanisis Gora.” “This discovery has wider consequences for knowledge of large-scale settlements and their development processes in addition to significance for the Southern Caucasus.”

Design and Defense: An Age-old Fortress
The analysis found that Dmanisis Gora’s two tiers of fortification walls fulfilled both expansion and protection functions. Constructed from mortar and coarse stones, these roughly six-foot-thick walls offered strong security against outside hazards.

While the outer settlement appears to be a summer center, the inner stronghold most certainly held a more permanent population. Sparse artifacts found inside the outer walls imply that it would have been less densely inhabited, perhaps serving migratory pastoral communities during particular seasons.

The writers of the study said, “If the inner and outer areas were occupied simultaneously, as we propose, this settlement would rank among the largest in the South Caucasus during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages.”

Future Studies and Unfolding Riddles
Though the mapping process has yielded a lot of data, much of Dmanisis Gora is yet unknown. Examining “tens of thousands” of relics, including animal bones, pottery shards, and other fragments buried under the surface, researchers are now especially interested in These objects should help to clarify many facets of ancient society, including population density, agricultural methods, and animal movements.

Erb-Satullo underlined that continuous research could expose important information on how Late Bronze Age people evolved to fit their surroundings and built sophisticated communities.

A Greater Significance in general
Finding Dmanisis Gora not only emphasizes the possibilities of drone technology for archaeology but also creates fresh paths for knowledge of human history. Through recording the complex architecture and size of this ancient fortification, scientists seek to piece together the narrative of how early civilizations in the area flourished and interacted with their surroundings.

This discovery provides insightful analysis of the resiliency and inventiveness of past civilizations, therefore attesting to the mix of modern invention with historical inquiry. The results of scholars exploring the secrets of Dmanisis Gora should be very important for the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, and historical research as they keep exploring.

An homage to the past leading to the future
One amazing illustration of how old and modern technologies could interact to reveal secret chapters of human history is Dmanisis Gora. This site offers to improve our knowledge of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages and offers a window into the life and legacy of people who built the planet as we know it now via continuous research and excavation.

From developments in drone mapping to the study of ancient relics, the identification of this mega-fortress marks a turning point in archeological study and provides an encouraging view of the countless opportunities for inquiry and discovery.

This result also reminds us of the need to conserve and research our common legacy so that the past stories can guide and inspire the next generations.

Discover more insights in the original article on Popular Mechanics

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