The devastating history of the Treblinka death camp in Poland has been explored to its highest level of detail yet, thanks to a combination of surveying methods, including GPS mapping, ground-penetrating radar and aerial photography.
Forensic archaeologist, Caroline Sturdy Colls, has said her work on the site in recent years has put to bed any doubts that site of the camp contains a number of mass graves of the 800,000 Jews who met their deaths at the Nazi camp.
Treblinka was completely levelled by the Nazis when they vacated the site in 1943, and they went to great lengths to try to hide that the camp had ever been there at all.
Colls said, however, that modern technology has allowed her team to identify the graves without the need for excavations, thus respecting the Jewish law and tradition that bans the exhumation of the dead.
She explained that aerial photography from the 1940s has been aligned with new surveys, taken from satellites and GPS equipment and software. Potential sites for the graves were then surveyed using resistance surveys and electrical imaging. While these techniques could not pick up human remains they were able to highlight contrasts between the physical properties of the soil and features within it, such as buried remains or ground disturbance.
Colls explained, “This initial survey should be viewed as a start of what will hopefully be a long-term collaboration between myself and the Treblinka museum, aimed at providing new insights into the physical evidence, and allowing the victims of the Holocaust to be appropriately commemorated.”
< previous news
|
all news
|
next news >
Leica Geosystems has used the World of Concrete 2012 trade event to launch v3.0 of its Leica PaveSma...
Researchers from the University of Ulster have used GPS equipment and mapping technology to create a...