96 Quotes by Sarah Parcak

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sites are not static. They are akin to a filmstrip through time, in which building and destruction alternate, sometimes concurrently.

Consider that in most post-apocalyptic movies, you see hordes of bad guys wearing leather, riding motorcycles, armed to the teeth, and living in bad-guy strongholds. I always wonder where their underlying support system is and ask about the thousands of people tanning their clothing, processing the fuel for their vehicles, and working in the fields to feed them. Whenever.

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.

Eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile.

Archaeology holds all the keys to understanding who we are and where we come from.