Archaeologies I: Aerials Of Unrealised Civilisations
2024
Publication Design, Speculative Archaeology, Generative AI, Ancient Civilisations
- "Then perished all flesh that moved on the earth... Then life reappeared and life once again flourished... Times blend together, veiled by Legend, and Elam is situated halfway between the Dream and Barbarism."
- — Sophie Khan, Travel Journal, Villa Medici, 1993
A digital publication comprising 72 generative aerial images of hypothetical archaeological sites — each mapped to a specific moment in Earth's 26,000-year precessional cycle, with Sumerian numerical systems embedded as spatial coordinates governing the placement of architectural elements within each frame. The images are indistinguishable from real satellite survey photography. The publication asks what civilisations built with the same cosmological logic as Göbekli Tepe might have looked like — in the places, and at the moments, history did not record.
For early civilisations across Sumer, Egypt, and Mesoamerica, astronomy was not a separate discipline. It was the framework through which history, mythology, and urban form were understood as a unified system. The precession of Earth's axis — one degree of shift every 72 years — structured how these cultures counted time, oriented their cities, and narrated their own origins and ends. Modern archaeology tends to read these sites through a secular, empiricist lens that brackets cosmological logic as myth. Archaeologies I refuses that separation.
The result is a digital publication: 72 generative aerial images of hypothetical excavation sites, each mapped to a discrete moment in the precessional cycle and cross-referenced with Sumerian numerical systems, assembled and sequenced as a field survey archive.
The Images
The 72 images read as satellite survey photography — high-key black and white, extreme tonal compression, ancient structures appearing as precise geometric shadows in vast, arid landscapes. Some show dense circular compounds surrounded by radial earthworks; some show isolated structures in enormous white emptiness; some show hillside settlements cascading toward bodies of water; some show grid-organised urban plans barely distinguishable from the terrain. Across the 72, no two sites share the same morphology. The prompt structure and the decisions behind it are in the Generative Parameters section below.
The Methodology
The Sumerian sexagesimal system (base-60) is embedded structurally into the image generation — not as aesthetic reference but as a spatial coordinate system. From the book's Methodologies section: "I implemented a mapping system that correlated Sumerian numerals to specific spatial coordinates within a 3080×3080 pixel matrix." Cuneiform numerals govern where architectural elements appear within each generated image.
The methodology notes a significant observation: "The AI-produced sites consistently exhibited highly symmetrical and geometrically precise layouts, often forming circular or hexagonal structures. In contrast, actual archaeological sites typically demonstrate more organic growth patterns, influenced by topographical constraints and diachronic development processes." The AI, prompted with cosmological mathematics, generates sites of greater geometric precision than any real civilisation ever built — the Platonic ideal of a city organised by astronomical principle, rather than what those civilisations actually constructed under the pressure of terrain, time, and compromise. The precision is the machine's fingerprint: what looks like perfection is the absence of the constraints that made real cities imperfect, and human.
The Site Names
Some images carry real archaeological site names — Göbekli Tepe, Jiroft Cultural Complex, Herculaneum, Novgorod — not as spatial references but as temporal ones. Each name marks which moment in the precessional cycle the image corresponds to, and which historical epoch or geography aligns with that moment. The sites themselves are entirely imagined. Not what Göbekli Tepe looked like from above — but at the precessional moment when Göbekli Tepe was being built, what other civilisations — built with the same cosmological mathematics, oriented by the same celestial logic — might have existed elsewhere in the world, and left no record except the shape of the ground?
Generative Parameters
"a top down satellite google earth view of an intricate odeon megastructure archaeological digsite in a vast natural land with unorthodox and creative shape and colour --chaos 10 --v 6.1"
Four decisions in the prompt structure:
Platform specificity: "Google Earth" rather than "aerial view" — naming the platform biases the model toward the precise aesthetic of satellite cartography: high-altitude, slightly desaturated, orthographic.
Morphological suggestion: "Odeon megastructure" — an odeon is a small ancient circular theatre. Scaled to megastructure and placed mid-excavation, it produces the large, circular, partially-revealed forms throughout the series.
Typological permission: "Unorthodox and creative" grants explicit permission to depart from conventional archaeological typology — producing sites that are geometrically surprising without becoming spatially incoherent.
Variation and processing: --chaos 10 introduces enough variation to make each of the 72 sites distinct while keeping them legible as surveys. The absence of --style raw — unlike [Meta]Morphosis — is deliberate: real satellite imagery has a processed quality that raw mode would suppress.
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