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" 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. "

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" 'Satellite archaeology' refers to the use of NASA and commercial high resolution satellite datasets to map and discover past structures, cities, and geological features. "

Sarah Parcak

Past

Resolution

NASA

" Indiana Jones is old school; we've moved on from Indy. Sorry, Harrison Ford. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am honored to receive the TED Prize, but it's not about me; it's about our field - and the thousands of men and women around the world, particularly in the Middle East, who are defending and protecting sites. "

" We only have a limited amount of time left before many archaeological sites all over the world are destroyed. So we have to be really selective about where we dig. "

" I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past. "

" 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. "

" I try to tell a lot of stories to make my students aware that the world is a very cool place with many problems that need solving, and that they all can help solve them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Sarah Parcak

Perspective

Space

" When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck. But you know, these shells, they're hard to find. They're covered in sand. They're difficult to see. "

Sarah Parcak

Parents

Growing Up

" The majority of the research I do is archaeological research, but to me, as a professor, the most important thing is to encourage and mentor students. "

" We're literally just beginning to learn how to use satellites to find sites. More and more people are realizing there's this incredible tool. "

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

" You can theorize as much as you want about what you think you're seeing, but until you get out there and dig, you can't tell exactly what it is. "

" The only technology that can 'see' beneath the ground is radar imagery. But satellite imagery also allows scientists to map short- and long-term changes to the Earth's surface. Buried archaeological remains affect the overlying vegetation, soils and even water in different ways, depending on the landscapes you're examining. "

" Satellites record data in different parts of the light spectrum that we can't see. And it's that information that allows satellites to be so powerful in terms of looking at things like vegetation health, finding different kinds of geology that may indicate an oil deposit or some kind of mineralogical deposit that can be mined. "

" There's always a little jump to your heart when you realize you've got looting. "

" 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. "

" WorldView-3 goes into the mid-infrared wavelength, allowing you to see very subtle geological differences on the sites at a 0.4-metre resolution. "

" 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. "

" Google Earth is an incredible resource because from hundreds of miles in space, we can zoom in, and we can find things. Everyone always looks for their house first. That is the tip of the iceberg with remote sensing. "

" 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. "

" To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist. "

" We've found that patterns of site looting have increased between 500 and 1000 percent since the start of the Arab Spring. Now this is a problem as old as human beings. 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've always loved teaching and reading and talking to people, and my grandfather was a professor. "

" 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. "

" 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. "