Top 55 Sarah Parcak Quotes

We emphasise the features on satellite maps by adding colours to farmland, urban structures, archaeological sites, vegetation and water.

When people initially think of the term ‘space archaeologist,’ they think, ‘Oh, it’s someone who uses satellites to look for alien settlements on Mars or in outer space,’ but the opposite is true – we’re actually looking for evidence of past human life on planet earth.

In archaeology, context is everything. Objects allow us to reconstruct the past. Taking artifacts from a temple or an ancient private house is like emptying out a time capsule.

I give my grandfather, Dr Harold Young, a forestry Professor at the University of Maine, full credit for my career path. He pioneered the use of aerial photography in forestry in the 1950s, and we think he worked as a spy for the CIA during the Cold War, mapping Russian installations.

What is amazing to me as an archaeologist is that the more and more I study, I realize we are resilient, we are creative, we are brilliant, and this is what makes us human, and that hasn’t changed since we’ve been human.

People were looting tombs 5,000 years ago in Egypt as soon as people were buried, but the problem is only getting worse and worse.

I predict that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of undiscovered ancient sites across the globe. The only way to map them and locate them quickly is from satellites.

When you think about archaeology, archaeology is the only field that allows us to tell the story of 99 percent of our history prior to 3,000 B.C. and writing.

There’s even an aircraft sensor system that sends down hundreds of thousands of pulses of light measured at different return rates. It allows you to literally strip away vegetation and see entire cities beneath the rain forest canopy. This is the unbelievable future of archaeology.

What satellites help to show us is we’ve actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world… It’s the most exciting time in history to be an archaeologist.

The looters are using Google Earth, too. They’re coming in with metal detectors and geophysical equipment. Some ask me to confirm sites.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been walking over an archaeological site. And you can’t see anything on the ground, and pull back hundreds of miles in space, and all of a sudden you can see streets and roads and houses and even pyramids.

How do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, wearing baseball mitts.

Archaeologists gave the military the idea to use aerial photographs for spying and field survey. We are fortunate that the spatial and spectral resolutions of the imagery available to us are so broadly useful for archaeology.

It’s absolutely critical, you know, to train young men and women not just to find sites, but also to protect sites, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring. There’s been significant site-looting in Egypt and elsewhere across the Middle East.

Before doing fieldwork in Middle Egypt, I analyzed satellite imagery to determine exactly where I wanted to go. Within three weeks, I found about 70 sites. If I had approached this as a traditional foot survey, it would have taken me three and a half years.

Archaeologists have used aerial photographs to map archaeological sites since the 1920s, while the use of infrared photography started in the 1960s, and satellite imagery was first used in the 1970s.

We’re using satellites to help map and model cultural features that could never be seen on the ground because they’re obscured by modernization, forests, or soil.

I am part of a network of people monitoring what’s happening at ancient sites in Iraq and Syria – from space. We can see clearly the destruction.

It’s both Indiana Jones and ‘National Geographic’ that inspired me to be an Egyptologist.

Less than 1 percent of ancient Egypt has been discovered and excavated. With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we’re in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past?

We have so many issues with overpopulation and urbanization and site looting. And this isn’t just Egypt. This is everywhere in the world, even in America. So we only have a limited amount of time left before many archaeological sites all over the world are destroyed.

I am one of many people documenting damage and looting at ancient sites from space – it is such a crucial tool.

I’ve always loved teaching and reading and talking to people, and my grandfather was a professor.

That’s what I want to do, ultimately: figure out a way to get the world engaged with discovery and protecting these ancient sites.

All over the world, we’re finding out that, you know, whether it’s Egypt or Syria or Central America, what satellites are showing is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of previously unknown settlements all over the world, and what archaeology does, it helps us to understand this common humanity that we have.

I keep being surprised by the amount of archaeological sites and features that are left to find all over the world.

I’m looking at looting photos from space, and there are people putting their lives on the line every day protecting their heritage. I call these people the real culture heroes.

You just pull back for hundreds of miles using the satellite imagery, and all of a sudden this invisible world become visible. You’re actually able to see settlements and tombs – and even things like buried pyramids – that you might not otherwise be able to see.

It’s an important tool to focus where we’re excavating. It gives us a much bigger perspective on archaeological sites. We have to think bigger, and that’s what the satellites allow us to do.

There are so many previously unknown sites and structures all over the world. And I think most importantly what satellites help to show us is we’ve actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world.

With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we’re in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past?

We have so many thousands of sites to find across the globe and new techniques to test. The field keeps evolving with the technology, which makes things exciting.

I hope my work contributes to understanding long-term patterns of human behavior and how we survive, thrive, or fail during times of environmental, social, and economic crisis.

When a wall is slowly covered over by earth, the materials it’s made from decay and become part of the soils around and above it, sometimes causing vegetation above and next to the wall to grow faster or slower. Satellite imagery helps archaeologists to pick up these subtle changes.

If you look at the Nile on a map of Egypt, you don’t think it has moved very much, but the river is very violent and has moved over time.

To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist.

We’ve got to map all of our ancient history before it’s gone because, let’s face it, if we don’t have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

A lot of people are surprised when I talk so much about the present, but politics is just a crucial part of archaeology.

Getting permission to use a drone in Egypt was problematical.

When you think about the scale of human populations all over the world and the fact that there’s so much here, really, the only way to be able to visualize that is to pull back in space… It allows us to see hidden temples and tombs and pyramids and even entire settlements.

You think looting is bad in Egypt, look at Peru, India, China. I’ve been told in China there are over a quarter-million archaeological sites, and most have been looted. This is a global problem of massive proportions, and we don’t know the scale.

Imagery is powerful. Imagery is provocative – satellite imagery much more so because it is from space, and it allows us to get this perspective that we don’t have to have otherwise.

We want to excite the world about what’s out there. But we don’t want them to say, ‘Oh, there are lots of sites in Egypt – let’s loot.’

I’m an Egyptologist. I’m a remote sensing specialist, and I’m a space archaeologist.

What if Hiram Bingham had the technology to find hundreds of other archaeological sites at the same time and create entire 3-D maps of the ancient landscape accurate to within a few inches?

If you really want to be a good archaeologist, you have to understand ancient DNA; you have to understand chemical analysis to figure out the composition of ancient pots. You have to be able to study human remains. You need to be able to do computer processing and, in some cases, computer programming.

In Egypt, I do survey work on the ground. That’s really the most important part of using satellite images. You know, it helps us to find potential locations for sites, and then we get to go there on the ground and confirm what we’ve seen.

If you find a series of linear shapes in the same alignment as known archaeological features, and they match excavated examples, you still need to excavate to confirm, but you can be fairly sure that the imagery is accurate.