Endangered archaeology

After all the years I've spent researching the life of Stewart Newcombe he remains a fascinating and absorbing character, still able to surprise and still surprisingly relevant. Recently, one of his many diverse interests overlapped with a contemporary research project run by three leading British universities which has at its core the protection of endangered archaeological sites across a study area of 7000 kilometers and in more than twenty countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. 

The EAMENA Project, a five-year Arcadia Foundation funded project (2015-2020), was set up to record and make available information about archaeological sites and landscapes which are under threat across the Middle East and North Africa. The project is based in the Universities of Oxford, Leicester and Durham. The archaeological heritage of the region, which is of international significance for all periods, is under increasing threat from massive and sustained population explosion, agricultural development, urban expansion, warfare, and looting.

The project uses aerial photography and satellite imagery to map unrecorded and endangered archaeological sites, to a uniform standard, and evaluates and monitors their condition. The information provided will assist with the effective protection of these sites by the relevant authorities. The use of satellite and aerial imagery is especially important for those countries where access on the ground is currently either impossible or severely restricted (e.g. Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen). 

Michael Fradley, an archaeologist at Oxford University who manages the project, contacted me seeking information on Newcombe who was an important early advocate for the use of aerial photography for photogrammetric mapping. After the end of the war Newcombe remained very vocal about the potential of the technique. In 1920 he pushed for an experimental air survey by the Royal Air Force of the Nile flood region from the old Aswan Dam to the Cairo Barrage for water management purposes but for other projects he came up against significant opposition, not least an unwillingness among the Corps of Royal Engineers to move beyond their traditional ground survey methods.

Newcombe at his Oxford house. Courtesy of Joseph Berton

Fradley, during a visit to the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, wrote to ask: "Just out of interest, do you know which house Newcombe lived in on the Woodstock Road in Oxford. I find myself trying to guess every time I get the bus in to work." 

Today: The site of Newcombe's former home

It is easy to see why Fradley missed it. The house at number 300 has been long gone, demolished to make way for a rather unremarkable estate of flats, which by a strange twist of irony is just a few streets away from the EAMENA Project's office. Woodstock Road is a major road running through the leafy suburb of North Oxford but the clue is obvious as Newcombe was credited when they built the current development and a prominent sign was placed at the entrance. It is doubtful if the residents of Newcombe Court are aware of the connection. 

 

Newcombe's air survey of the Nile in September 1920 produced 1200 glass plates of overlapping photographs but only a section of one plate was used in his 1921 paper  'Contouring by the Stereoscope on air photos' (RE Journal Vol. XXXIV July-Dec 1921). It is not known if this photographic archive exists. "If the full series of 1200 photographs survives and could be located," Fradley reflects, "it could be of major value to archaeologists to identify and document sites destroyed or eroded by the modern occupation of the Nile valley, which has increased significantly in intensity over the past 100 years." 

Contoured hills east of Cairo

Newcombe's paper won him the Royal Engineers’ prestigious Montgomerie Prize in recognition of his contribution to exploration and surveying and he continues to achieve recognition in academic journals over one hundred years later. There is a natural evolution from when a plate camera was first strapped to the wings of a wood and canvas aeroplane to the use of equipment like drones or satellites. Newcombe’s reputation was built on surveying by horse, camel or by foot across inhospitable lands often in the most appalling of conditions. At heart he was an adventurer and loved nothing better than to ride off to see what was over the next hill. But without doubt the technique of mapping the world by aeroplane and camera had begun to expose much more of its unknown and unknowable parts, more than could ever be achieved by land surveying. 

For many years Newcombe enjoyed the connectivity to the environment, and more importantly to its inhabitants, yet at the same time he recognised the need to explore ways to break free from the rigours and difficulties of those journeys and to see the world from new and exciting perspectives through the utilisation of emerging technologies that he helped develop and promote. As such he was clearly a man of his time who lived to enjoy the best of both worlds.  

For more information about the work of EAMENA, go to eamena.arch.ox.ac.uk