ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE of AMERICA

                                         KENTUCKY SOCIETY

Archaeology Lectures, Spring 2026

With the support of our academic partners at the University of Louisville, we look forward to presenting a series of talks in which internationally-recognized scholars discuss their latest research on a variety of archaeological topics. 

​​​​​​U-2 Over Egypt: A Remote Survey of the Nile Delta

Using Cold War Aerial Photography   

Dr. Oren Siegel, University of Toronto 

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​​​​​​​​​Thursday, February 19, 2026 • 6:00 PM EST ​
University of Louisville
Center for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage
1606 Rowan Street
Louisville, KY 40202




















Don't miss the our first talk of 2026! Archaeologist Oren Siegel will be speaking about the use of declassified Cold War aerial photographs in the archaeological survey of the Nile Delta. 

During the height of the Cold War, the United States flew a series of reconnaissance missions using U-2 spy planes over Egypt. Film negatives from two flights that cover much of the Nile Valley and Nile Delta from 1959 have recently been declassified, and the resulting imagery is both earlier and higher resolution than publicly available CORONA satellite imagery. This talk will discuss the ongoing work by the Brown-Toronto U2 Aerial Photography of Egypt Project to digitize this imagery from the National Archives and Records Administration and make these photographs publicly available to all interested researchers. Beyond this, I will showcase the results of our ongoing remote survey of Beheira Governorate using U-2 imagery, highlighting how this imagery gives us a unique window onto a landscape that has changed significantly over the last 5 decades. The talk will close by looking at how this compares to other satellite imagery and aerial photography and highlight the potential of this dataset for archaeological research.​

Dr. Oren Siegel is an Assistant Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Toronto 

U-2 Over Egypt is presented by the Kentucky Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and the University of Louisville Department of Anthropology.