three types of images: topographic maps dating from the mid-19th century to the present, pioneering aerial photographs taken by archaeologists between the 1920s and 1950s, and remote-sensing data such as satellite imagery. It then merges these components to create pictures of on-the-ground features such as archaeological sites that show how the landscape of the Middle East -- broadly defined by CAMEL's researchers as extending from Greece to Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa -- has changed over the past two centuries. The resulting image is a dense jumble of varying pixel sizes and colors, but digitally peeling away its layers is like unearthing a rich, virtual trove of information. This data is invaluable, especially to scholars studying the Middle East. Before the mid-20th-century advent of mechanized farming techniques, deep plowing, urban development, and modern warfare, this landscape had remained relatively untouched for thousands of years. Through composite CAMEL images, it is now possible to follow everything from the course of ancient rivers and patterns of vegetation growth to the emergence of recent looters' holes and the damage sustained to millennia-old mud-brick palaces during the latest wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. CAMEL is also revolutionizing the way archaeologists approach fieldwork in the region. "For the first time, we can actually see sites as part of a broader archaeological landscape of topography, ancient agriculture, herding systems, and roads," says Oriental Institute (OI) director Gil Stein, who used CAMEL data at Tell Zeidan, the sixth- to fifth-millennium B.C. site in Syria where he