Google Earth has made the hostile Afghan terrain far more navigable for a group of Australian archaeologists, who have used the program to uncover hundreds of previously unknown sites in the war-torn country.
Project leader David Thomas, a PhD student at La Trobe University in Melbourne, said he believed his project was the first time anyone in the world had published archaeological research using data from Google Earth.
Thomas and three colleagues - Claudia Zipfel and Suzanna Nikolovski of La Trobe and Fiona Kidd from the University of Sydney - have used the Google Earth images of Afghanistan to glean new details from already discovered sites, map known sites that don't have any drawn plans and, most significantly, uncover hundreds of sites that were previously undiscovered.
Excellent.