By the end of the day, the soil had dried out and the desert once again presented a uniformly featureless face. Now, with access to satellite images, we have a chance to recover some of the canal network that we saw that day, if we can find an image taken just after the right amount of rain. We are, therefore, ordering several images from a variety of dates. The visible detail will not be as sharp as that available from a kite photograph, but these images, when manipulated, should show features that would not be visible to the naked eye or on a standard photograph. We have additional resources here, however.
Radar images are extremely sensitive to differences in water retention of soils.
It is clear, therefore, that by studying and manipulating the radar image along with the variety of satellite images that we now have, and being able to identify certain features because of our long acquaintance with the Nippur area, we can derive extremely detailed information about the ancient landscape. We should be able to use the images to derive new information on the site of Nippur itself, not just its surroundings. The images may allow us to extend and clarify the nature of buildings that we discovered with the use of kite photographs in the 1980s. The plans of all of these buildings showed up on the photographs as dark lines on a lighter ground. Here, we had the phenomenon of water retention in reverse of what I have described for the canals at Umm al-Hafriyat.