Many of Parcak's colleagues from around the world are lauding her past work and are excited to learn more about the development of her new TED-funded project. (Image taken in December 2014 by Greg Mumford and Sarah Parcak, and used with permission.) In this image, Sarah Parcak stands for scale in the middle of an area that looters totally exposed.
Tombs are from mixed time periods (Old Kingdom-Late Period). This entire area was virtually unlooted prior to 2011 but is now heavily looted. Antiquities and the support of HE Minister of Antiquities Dr Mamdouh el Damaty. This visit was done with full permission of Egypt’s Ministry of. Parcak's work is a natural extension of this technology for the 21st century, and she has literally written the book on Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology. But using satellites for archaeology, Parcak notes in her National Geographic Explorer bio, is not easy and requires a "deep knowledge of historical events, the geology of how materials degrade over time, topography of landscapes, seasonal weather conditions, and the culture as a whole." Archaeologists have been using aerial photography for centuries - originally using hot air balloons, then airplanes, and now drones - to see features like the Nazca lines in Peru, whose shape is much more obvious from above. Her satellite mapping of Egypt unearthed 17 potentially unknown pyramids, as well as more than one thousand tombs and three thousand settlements.Īs she explains further in her six-minute 2012 TED talk, this method can find ancient cities that have been "missing" for millennia.
Parcak's work involves infrared imagery to see more than is possible with the human eye, as well as advanced computer algorithms that help separate the ruins of ancient temples or tombs from mere piles of rocks.
But she doesn't just browse Google Earth and decide where to stick her trowel in the ground.
She's been called a space archaeologist, as Parcak uses satellite imagery beamed down from just outside Earth's orbit to see archaeological sites that have been lost to time.
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