Since the first meeting in April 2021, the photo reading group has met 18 times.

While we have discussed aerial images of different dates at different locations, membership of the group has meant that we also have been able to include mini seminar-type presentations about, for example, stone-walled sites in South Africa, Roman and medieval features, and landscapes in Spain and Poland respectively.

Full-scale talks have been given on remote sensing (and other) results at Caričin Grad by Aleksandar Stamenkovic (since given as a talk for all AARG members) and on AI by Iris Kramer who gave a very clear introduction to AI and how to train machines to ‘see’ our material and showed some of her results. Anyone wanting to keep up with her progress can access regular updates on Twitter.

And a few weeks ago, Martin Fowler gave a talk about his use of HEXAGON images at Masada and Machaerus. He has written a piece on that for this issue of AARGnews which will give an idea of the high resolution of these 1970s images but will lack the 3D effect he achieved in the talk by rotating the images. This has been proposed as a future talk for AARG members.

The WG address list currently has 15 members (who have never yet all been there at one time) which provides a relaxed setting of people who know one another as well as is possible using Zoom.

A recent email was circulated to invite new members to the WG and produced zero responses so we imagine we are now at maximum capacity. However, if anyone is tempted, the present group may accept one or two new members but greater numbers will require AARG’s committee to persuade someone else to establish a second WG.