![]() To complement the historical images, archaeologists rely on modern aerial imaging. Stitched together, they offer a bird's-eye view-more accurate than contemporary maps made on the ground-of how trenches and other military installations were constructed and changed over time. World War I saw aerial photography as a new tool for surveillance on enemy positions, and now thousands of these historical images comprise the oldest aerial records for the region. To understand how this warscape developed, and what sites remain, Stichelbaut and other researchers use aerial archaeology. While the conflict was documented in thousands of first-hand written accounts, photographs, and film reels-and subject to countless post-war assessments-archaeology still adds another dimension to our understanding of one the most violent conflicts in modern history. ![]() Stichelbaut, of Ghent University in Belgium, is among a small group of archaeologists investigating those physical marks that remain from the Great War more than a century later. "Those are huge numbers," Stichelbaut says. But the statistics that really astonish archaeologist Birger Stichelbaut are the ones that show how deeply the landscape was transformed in parts of Europe: A 37-mile stretch along one 420-mile front line in Belgium, for instance, was shot through with more than 3,000 miles of trenches. Between 19, more than eight million military personnel died and more than six million civilians were killed. World War I was the planet’s first global industrialized conflict, and the use of new technologies like planes, armored tanks, machine guns, grenades, and poison gas resulted in unprecedented devastation.
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