I can’t resist a news story that starts like this:
High in the skies over Kazakhstan, space-age technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground.
Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old.
I love the specific, quirky details:
- The search that led to the discovery was inspired by a Discovery Channel program, “Pyramids, Mummies and Tombs.”
- The earthworks were spotted using Google Earth.
- The discovery was made by Dmitriy Dey, described as a Kazakh economist and archaeology enthusiast. (All the best stories about the discovery of Ancient and Mysterious Ruins start with an “amateur enthusiast,” don’t they?)
And this is the kicker:
The so-called Steppe Geoglyphs remain deeply puzzling and largely unknown to the outside world.
That leaves plenty of room for a writer’s imagination to fill in the blanks….