The sad truth is, archaeologists don't always have an opportunity to excavate a site properly. Rarely are sites perfectly preserved like Pompeii or Ozette or Cer�n. Fortunately, archaeologists are well-experienced at piecing together stories from tiny broken fragments or, as in the case of Hibabiya, photographs.
Hawker Woodcock biplane used in the 1920s by the RAF for, I believe but am not absolutely sure yet, aerial reconnaissance of the Trans-Jordan. Photo from the Royal Air ForceHibabiya was an early Islamic village, found by RAF pilots in the 1920s and visited by Henry Field and O.G.S. Crawford back in the early decades of the 20th century, and again by A.N. Garrard and N.P. Stanley-Price in the 1970s. But Arabian archaeology has grown over the past few decades, with lots more excavations leading to a broader depth of understanding of local prehistory and, especially, Islamic history.
Sadly, Hibabiya was destroyed before it could be excavated. By using a combination of historical documentation assembled by the RAF pilots and the archaeological visitors, including aerial photographs and collections of artifacts, David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia was able to put the pieces together and build a new (possible) interpretation of Hibabiya.
This story, and the one about desert kites last year, has piqued my interest into aerial photography used for archaeology, both by the RAF beginning in the 1920s and, more recently, by the Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East (APAAME), established under the support of Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan in 1978. If I can come up with something sensible about it, I'll post it here. In the meantime, and if you're interested, I recommend you poke around on your own using Kennedy's Archives of Middle Eastern aerial photographs as a starting point.
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