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" 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

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

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

" Choosing an unconventional career path - I am not a traditional Egyptologist by any means. I found what I love, and I have stuck with it. "

" 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. "

" Scorpions like holes. We had to put our arms in the holes to dig out the smelting residues. We always performed critter checks before an excavation, but one morning, I put an arm in and felt a sharp pierce. When I brought my hand out, it was red and already swelling. "

Sarah Parcak

Red

Morning

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

Sarah Parcak

Survey

Three

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Sarah Parcak

Military

Archaeology

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" A picture is worth a thousand words. A satellite image is worth a million dollars. "

" 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. "

" Think about what would happen if Indiana Jones and Google Earth had a love child. I use high-resolution and NASA satellites and look for subtle differences on the surface of the earth that locate buried ancient pyramids and towns and ancient tombs, which we then go and excavate. "

" 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. "

" Archaeologists use datasets from NASA and commercial satellites, processing the information using various off-the-shelf computer programs. These datasets allow us to see beyond the visible part of the light spectrum into the near, middle, and far infrared. "

" 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. "

" Satellite imagery is the only way we can map the looting patterns effectively. "

" What we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow. "

" 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. "

" Looting has an immense impact on our ability to understand our global cultural heritage; once these objects are gone, so too is our chance of piecing together humanity's shared story. "

" Scientists use satellites to track weather, map ice sheet melting, detect diseases, show ecosystem change... the list goes on and on. I think nearly every scientific field benefits or could benefit from satellite imagery analysis. "

" 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. "