A team of researchers at the University of Dartmouth have used declassified Cold War satellite imagery to show the placements of a line of Roman forts built 2,000 years ago. Their locations span from Mosul in Iraq all the way to Aleppo in Syria.

In doing so, the team refuted the findings of Father Antoine Poidebard. In the 1920s he conducted one of the world’s first aerial surveys of the area using a WWI-era biplane. Poidebard documented 116 forts, arguing that they were constructed from north to south to establish an eastern boundary of the Roman Empire.

“I was surprised to find that there were so many forts and that they were distributed in this way because the conventional wisdom was that these forts formed the border between Rome and its enemies in the east, Persia or Arab armies,” said lead author Jesse Casana. “While there’s been a lot of historical debate about this, it had been mostly assumed that this distribution was real, and that Poidebard...