It is important to note that many of these are re-photographs of prints or mosaics, which was possibly a mechanism used by the RAF for copying developed material. As stated, these are predominantly glass plate negatives (most likely gelatin dry plate).
This original deposit is likely to be those items now in the UCL Collection, numbered AP1–1356, or possibly all the way to AP1405 (note that there are no items between AP1101–1202 due to misnumbering). Crawford stated to the RGS a number of 1,700 negatives the British Museum Trustee Minutes of 8th June 1929 state 1,150 glass plate negatives and nine rolls of film. In a presentation to the Royal Geographic Society (RGS) and published in The Geographical Journal in 1929, Crawford describes how he enlisted the help of the Air Ministry to photograph sites of archaeological interest, and stated that "these, and also many existing but obsolete negatives abroad, should be handed over to the Director of the British Museum, to form the nucleus of a national collection." The exact contents of this original deposit, however, are not entirely clear from the written record. Crawford to The British Museum of "obsolete" photographs collected from the RAF during a tour of Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt in 1928, made at his own expense. This collection originated from a deposit made by O.G.S. One of the glass plate negative boxes, and glass plates encased in RAF envelopes at the UCL Institute of Archaeology Special Collections. The UCL collection is one of the larger collections of RAF imagery from the Middle East, and its survival for use in archaeological research was no accident. What has survived is fragmented, so we are trying to find and piece together those fragments because these images are an amazing resource for discovery, monitoring and analysis of archaeological sites. One of the reasons for this is that the aerial photography conducted by the Royal Air Force in the Mandate territories was not comprehensively archived, and some of it was destroyed once it had served its immediate use. Recently, EAMENA put out a call for information regarding collections of aerial photography. The photographs are predominantly of Iraq, the former Transjordan, Egypt, and Sudan (see distribution map).
#Framebyframe website series#
The collection material is accessible through contact with the UCL Institution of Archaeology Collections Manager Ian Carroll: UCL Institute of Archaeology Collections Air Survey photographs comprise a series of glass plate negatives, cellulose negatives, safety negatives, and prints of Royal Air Force (RAF) aerial photographs taken between 19. The digitised collection is available for browsing through an Album on our Flickr. This blog was first featured on the EAMENA blog on September 4, 2017.
“Near Eastern Landscapes and Declassified U2 Aerial Imagery.” Advances in Archaeological Practice. “Historical Imagery of Desert Kites in Eastern Jordan.” NearEastern Archaeology 80.2: 74-83. Available on JSTOR. As we know from our AAJ project, it is often difficult today to find traces of even the large Kites visible on the Hunting photos of 1953 and many have gone entirely. It is precisely there – with better quality soils and more precipitation, that the expansion of agriculture and removal of the basalt covering has damaged and destroyed many hundreds of sites of all kinds. There will be particularly useful work to be done on that key area west of Azraq where the HAS material is very useful but poor quality combining it with the better U2 material of parts of the area. The Hunting Aerial Survey of 1953 is a little earlier in date but the quality is evidently poorer and it did not extend much east of Azraq. It is plainly a laborious task still to use the material but the quality is very good and – of particular interest to me, is a flight of 1960 down the Jordanian panhandle from east to west and over and beyond Azraq. At least one product of that work has now been published (Hammer and Lauricella 2017) – though not by Jesse Casana.
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