Remote Sensing the Archaeological Traces of Boat Movement in the Marshes of Southern Mesopotamia

This study presents the results of the first remote sensing survey of hollow ways in Southern Mesopotamia between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, primarily using the imagery in Google Earth. For archaeologists, hollow ways are important trace fossils of past human movement that inform about how people travelled in the past and what considerations were important to them as they moved through the landscape. In this study, remotely sensed hollow ways were ground-truthed and dated by association with both palaeochannels and known archaeological sites. Contextual and morphological evidence of the hollow ways indicate that they are likely the archaeological manifestation of ethnographically attested water channels formed through the dense reeds of marshlands in southern Iraq, not formed by traction overland like other known hollow ways. The map itself documents the first known hollow ways preserved underwater and one of the best-preserved landscapes of past human movement in the Near East.