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Sarah Parcak

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2021-03-24

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2021-03-24

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1. “And there's so many brilliant young academics, Indigenous archaeologists and specialists. And I want to use my platform to celebrate them and honor them and make sure that they're the ones whose voices get heard now. It's, you know, I'm happy to take a back seat and to let them speak instead of me. So it's their turn.”

   2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Is building a new version of our Google Explore platform. We're going to have a machine learning component that will allow us to go much faster. And we have a big official partnership with the Ministry of Culture in India and the government of India. And we're rebuilding this platform. We're going to be launching it later this year so everyone stay tuned and it will allow millions of people from around the world to help map and protect archaeological sites. So that's what I want to do. I spend a lot of time mentoring junior colleagues in archaeology and in the social sciences and kind of I'm also giving a lot more advice to cultural heritage bodies, to the US State Department with a lot of their heritage work. I'm working on some really interesting documentaries. There are some potential entertainment opportunities. I just want to use my voice to be an advocate for the past and to empower as many people as possible to be new voices. I get tired I'm tired of hearing my own voice. It's time for other people to be voices.”

   2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Infamous probably at this particular moment, I especially in the last couple years have been reflecting a lot on my power and privilege within the field of academia. It can be overwhelming at times, but also I feel like I have an enormous responsibility because not very many people in archaeology, in academia, generally speaking, get to move in the circles I get to move in. So I'm in a position now where I want to spend the rest of my career giving back and empowering people. It's why I'm so passionate about the not-for-profit I run Global Explorer. You know, I want to use the tools and technologies that my team at Global Explorer and I have developed and use them to empower foreign governments to create platforms and to allow people in those countries to help map and protect those archaeological sites. So right now our next big project for global”

   2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “That's a great question. I've always been good at finding things. I don't know if it's because I'm just good at hard and recognition, but even when I was five, six, seven years old, I could go to a whole patch of clover and reach in and find the four leaf clover. I just, I could from a young age. And so I think my parents recognized that I was good at pattern recognition. Everyone has diverse talents. I always love puzzles and games. They always encouraged me. They always bought me for my birthday and for holidays and fun magazines where I could test or try out this pattern recognition. When I started taking remote sensing classes, I got good at finding things. It's part practice and part being good at how to recognition. But also there's enormous luck, right? You know, I got very”

   2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Who are from America's heartland who spend a lot of time looking for things of a biblical nature? And 100% of the time they send me snapshots of rocks. Here's this amazing ship. Here is the lost city of whatever in Israel or wherever. And you found some rocks. Good job. I don't engage with them because it's not always smart to do it. But every now and then, every now and then I'll get an email from someone who said, hey, I think I found something. I'm like, you actually did find something. I don't have time to engage with you because my students come first. But yeah, you found something. So yeah, I'd say half the time. It's interesting and half the time. It's just part of the job. So yeah.”

   2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “So it's interesting. I get probably a couple emails a week from people. I would say it depends on where they're from. That is a good kind of barometer of the believability of what they find. So I would say that 100% of the emails I get from people in Scandinavia, whether it's Denmark, Norway, or Sweden, in particular Norway, people in Norway are really good at finding potential Viking ships in their fields. It's wild and they're always very polite and respectful and I'm delighted to get emails like that. I'm delighted to get emails from people anyway. It's just always fun to see what people find. I've gotten a lot of really interesting findings from people in places like Italy. You know, there's so many villas of different periods of time that people find in fields or elsewhere. I get a lot of emails from, let's just say interesting individuals.”

   2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “So this online citizen archaeology platform gives the world a chance to look at satellite images and help find sites and ultimately helps scale the work that we're doing. So I want to turn as many people around the world into space archaeologists. It's fun. They can do it. They're really good at it. And we need more. We need more eyes mapping these sites.”

   2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I think the training. So, you know, I've trained for years and years. I took a lot of remote sensing classes, computational classes. I don't program, I can't code. That's my line. I could have gone down that road and it just, it was too much. It was way, way, way too much for me to do that. So I would say it just takes a long time to learn to get really good at it. The students I've mentored at my university, they do an introductory course and then they do an advanced applications course. So after about a year of taking these courses and really intensely working in a lab environment, then and only then do students start feeling comfortable doing project work on their own. So it takes a year of intensive training. But this is one of the reasons I started my not-for-profit and our citizen archaeology platform because everyone is born an explorer. Everyone is good at using their eyes or understanding the environment around them and making observational or doing observation.”

   2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “I have to raise money, right? We're always hustling whether it's government grants or raising money from private individuals. Yeah, I think it's more managing. It's having enough of an understanding of all of these different subfields to know when someone's really good at them. So whether I can look at a paper and go, okay, that person is really good at this, or go, the papers we're citing, or they're really talented. I would love to invite them to join our project because it would be wonderful to collaborate with them. So yeah, so I think, again, every archaeologist who directs a project is the same as me. I just happened to specialize in a form of technology. And by the way, I feel like I'm drowning constantly. I can't keep up. There's so many new satellites and sensors and tools and techniques and new programs. I get overwhelmed. And I'm a mom. I'm a busy professor. I have my students. So yeah, I'm constantly behind. But again, my colleagues would tell you the same thing.”

   2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “I've gotten experiential. So it's from being in the field. I visited hundreds of museums. I've spent countless hours in museum collections learning, touching objects. So yeah, it's a lot, but it's also the field of archaeology. I guess that's why so many people really love it, because you get to touch on so many different areas. And I would never, for example, consider myself a specialist in bioarchaeology. I know a tivia. I know what I find pitting on a skull. I know what that could potentially mean. But also, you know, I'm in a position now where I'm a dig director. So that means I'm in charge of a large group of humans, most of whom are far smarter, more capable than I am in whatever they're doing. So they're specialists in pottery and bone and rocks, project geologists and conservation in art. We have project artists. We have specialists in excavation. And of course there's my Egyptian team, very talented Egyptian team.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “I guess jack of all trades, master of a few, but that's not true either because I have to know the remote sensing programs. I have to know geographic information systems. I have to be up to date on international cultural heritage laws. But I think I'm not special by a long shot. Every archaeologist is a specialist. This archaeologist is a specialist in the pottery of this period of time or does DNA or excavates human remains, their bioarchaeologists, or they do computation. So we all are specialists in a particular thing, but that's really broad. I mean, my unsexy, more academic term is landscape archaeologist, so I'm interested in ancient human environment interaction, which encompasses a lot of different fields and subfields. You know, I've taken many courses in geology. All of us who study Egyptology are also, we do a lot of training in art history because, of course, the iconography and the art and the objects that we're finding. So it takes a lot, but I would say most of the knowledge.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “We do a lot of things the old school, and sometimes your batteries run out, so you have to know geometry and trigonometry to be able to calculate things.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Yes, really important for some things. Calculus, no. No, no, no, no, no, not for the work that I do. And also a lot of the computer programs I use, it's like plug and play. So you put in your numbers and it spits out all the stats. So I don't need to calculate them. But I do need to understand what they mean. So I think this is really important. I think every archaeologist should take stats classes to understand mean, median mode, regression, what does it all mean. We've all seen the funny memes online of the charts that look fancy but don't mean anything and anyone can interpret anything, you know, just because just because there's data and there's numbers doesn't mean that there's a conclusion. Sometimes there's data and there's data that doesn't, it's a mess. So I think it's important to know stats really, really well for the work that I do and my colleagues do. And for all the measuring that we do, for all of the angles, for measuring when we're measuring in points, yes, of course, there's all these wonderful GPSs where you're just pinging it in the ground and it measures it for you.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “I mean, I think it went down, unfortunately. A really sad story. I know everyone looked for it. I think they found some pieces of aircraft they thought might come from it. I think maybe someday they'll find it. I think it's in a deep part of the ocean that they really have trouble kind of accessing, but unfortunately I think it went down. colleagues who do work in aviation certainly have a lot of diverse series. There was unfortunately some kind of malfunction and it just went down. It happened sometimes. It's awful.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Almost half were women. I could have very easily cited the archaeological remote sensing work of white, European, or American or Canadian men. I was very intentional in how I did that. And so the idea that, you know, we can't make space for individuals who are brilliant young archaeologists in our publications. It's something my colleagues and I are working on because they may not have the resources or the capabilities to pay a journal fee. We need to be doing that for them. So yeah, this goes beyond kind of who owns the data and it's more who are the people that get to be the storytellers who gets to be first author.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “That's another thorny issue. Who owns archaeological data? And what happens when you turn over all your data to a government in good faith, but they don't even have the computers to store it? Or they do, but they have computers from 15 years ago. And someone in the office steals the data and puts it online. Who's responsible then? Is it you for giving them the data or for them because they didn't have the right protection places in place? So governments, certainly, certainly Egypt at the end of every season, we have to turn in a fully detailed report, you know, a database of what we found. Of course, that's how archaeology works there. And our colleagues at the Ministry of Antiquities are very well trained and are good at kind of taking in this information, but it's not necessarily that way everywhere in the world. So who has the right to publish? Who has the right to be first author? One of the things I worked really hard on in archaeology from space is, you know, a third of the archaeologists that are mentioned in the book are Indigenous Archaeologists.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Hundred percent there aren't very many countries in the world that have a good sense of their own archaeological inventories. England is one, Israel is one, other countries have inventories, but you look at it and you're like, wait a minute, you're a huge country, you only have 2,000 sites in your inventory, that's not right, because the people who live there or work there don't have training in remote sensing. They don't have training in how to manage all of these sites of features. And of course, we worry that this information is going to get out and going to get in the hands of people who could potentially misuse it. So 100%, yeah, we definitely are finding things way faster than we can protect them. And that's why archaeologists will often sit on their data because they don't know what to do with it.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “So that stands for Light Detection and Ranging in places like Cambodia, the Khmer Angkorat, the Maya, or Central America, South America. Of course, we can't see through trees. And what this does, the ladder does, is it allows you to fly, whether it's an unmanned aerial vehicle, a helicopter, or airplane. It allows you to send down, it's a sensor system that allows you to send down thousands, millions of pulse beams of lasers where you can remove the overlaying vegetation, and you're left with what's called a bare earth model or a digital elevation model, and you can in effect see everything that's there. So my colleagues have used this to find tens of thousands of new features and sites in Central America and Cambodia and many, many other places in the world. It's the only way to see through trees.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “So in places like Egypt, in so many desert locations, of course, you walk over an archaeological site and it's a little bumpy, but you don't know what's going on beneath it. So we use things like ground penetrating radar to get these multiple levels of feedback and readings. And we're able to reconstruct with a high degree of certainty where there are buried walls and other features so that we can far better target our excavation work. In essence, in some cases, get a map of almost everything that's there.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “So Google Earth is wonderful because it's a free resource. We like free in archaeology. There isn't as much grant money now. And you can zoom in at virtually any archaeological site in the world for very high resolution image, so a resolution of two feet, 50 centimeters or lower. And you can see so much, right? You can scan back and forth. You can look at different kinds of year. Features will pop out. There have been thousands of discoveries made using Google Earth alone. So it's a great starting point for looking at archaeological sites and the landscape surrounding them.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “As I try to pick the top, top, top places, I would say Angkor Watt, it's the only place I've visited in the world aside from the Vatican where I got so overwhelmed I had to sit.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Breathtaking awe and majesty of where it's situated and just the fact that the world drops away around it and it's surrounded by mountains. And there's this beautiful little town that the Inca built on top of a mountain. It's like mind-blowing. So Easter Island, I would say Stonehenge at solstice just because it's worth seeing all the monks and everyone dressed up and the festivities and you get a sense of how that place would have been honored in antiquity and it's beautiful. So definitely Stonehenge. I would say you've got to hit Pompeii and Herculaneum just because they're so well preserved. And it's like you are walking around an old European village or town and you just get the sense of how people lived. I would say, and this is going to jump around a bit.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “So a month, you can probably, you know, depending on travel and you want to be able to take places in, so probably a couple days at every place. So maybe you have time to see kind of 10 things. You know, you want to hit the highlights versus, say, a themed tour. And I'm very biased, having been to very, very many places in the world. So I would say certainly going to Takul in Guatemala, that's unbelievable. And everyone who's seen the third Star Wars movie, you see the little temple sticking out from around the rainforest. And it's amazing because you have this extraordinary myosite and then you're surrounded by beautiful rainforest. So go there first, then fly down to Peru. You've got to see Machu Picchu. I had the chance to see it a couple years ago for the first time. And I wasn't prepared. You know, I've seen pictures. My colleagues had told me about it. But the”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “You're putting things together. It's a lot of fun. It's kind of like Tapas. I love also music. You alluded to bluegrass guitar. I play guitar. I love Egyptian music. So there's this wonderful instrument called an oud, sort of like a short squat stringed instrument. And so I love going to concerts. If there are concerts on at diverse locations, you know, Egyptian singers are wonderful. And also I love sailing on the Nile. So we'll sometimes take a faluca or a boat, you know, their dinner boats, especially in places like Luxor at night. It's beautiful. So yeah, I do a lot of non-touristy things. Also, they're amazing museums in Cairo that are not archaeological. They're wonderful galleries that are display work by wonderful Egyptian modern artists. And I love going to those as well.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “There are a couple of really, really famous cafes in the Hana Halili market, which is the big tourist market that everyone goes to to buy their tourist dishlock. But there are a couple of cafes and you go and you sit and you drink your mint tea, you smoke a shisha. I don't smoke except in Egypt. I love the sort of hubby bubbly pipes my husband and mother are horrified that I do this in Egypt, but I can't help it. It's one of my little enjoyments. And you just watch the world go by. You see every kind of person you can imagine people come up and try to sell you things. You see crazy things. You have great conversation with your friends. Maybe you catch a game of backyam and you gossip. That's incredibly pleasant. As I mentioned before, I love Egyptian food. They're some of my favorite restaurants in different parts of Cairo, so I'll go with my friends and we'll have an incredible meal. And the lovely thing about Egyptian food is that it's communal. So you'll order maybe 15 or 20 different dishes. You'll all have bites. You're all trying things.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “I've worked in Egypt now for more than 20 years to me. It's another home. It's our second home. It's where I met my husband. He's not Egyptian. He's Canadian and British. But we have a lot of very close Egyptian friends. There are our family. So if I had a day off in Cairo and I wasn't taking students around archaeological sites or not going to museums, so if I had a day off generally, depends on where I am, I guess, if I were in Luxor or Cairo would be a little bit different. So I love bird watching. I'm a bird nerd. So I love going off into more vegetated areas with my binoculars. Certainly going on the Nile, it's much easier in Luxor and Aswan. There are obviously far less people. And I'll spend certainly in the early in the morning, I'll go birdwashing. It's very peaceful. You see extraordinary types of birds. I love spending time in cafes with my Egyptian friends because you get to see the world go by.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “See things like changes in water temperature, turbidity, vegetation, changes to chemicals and fertilizers that are being used on those water sources and you can study rates of things like malaria or other diseases and compare it to changes you're seeing in the landscape.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Projects, and also in my at the time I was running remote sensing lab, and I was mentoring and working with a number of PhD and master's students from the School of Public Health, some from the School of Dentistry, some from biology, and they were interested in looking at kind of environmental aspects impacting modern diseases. So I collaborated with this team and looked at kind of vegetation and how landscape change over time and modern, to your point earlier about economic development on how changes to landscapes from growing populations impacted the growth of diseases and things like zoonoses. So, you know, whether mosquitoes or other animals that can pass on diseases, which of course we're seeing today with the pandemic. So yeah, so that's how I ended up on a couple of public health publications because of my remote sensing work. And obviously you can't zoom in from hundreds of miles in space and see mosquitoes. That is ridiculous. So who knows, maybe someday we will be, but you can.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Oh yeah, that's pretty, of all the things I've done, that may be one of the most random, although not the most random. So my university, University of Alabama at Birmingham, is pretty well known for its medical school. So we've got top 20, 25 schools of public health, medicine, nursing. And so one of the things that the university encourages, although it certainly doesn't force, they encourage their faculty on my side of campus, which is the College of Arts and Sciences, to collaborate with people working in the medical school. And so I can't remember, I feel like it was a long time ago, 12 years ago or so, there were some people who moved to UAB from another institution and they were specialists in the application of satellite imagery to mapping ancient diseases. And so I started working with them, started working with them.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Oh gosh, I have so many boy. I don't want to name one. I mean, so I'm a huge fan of banjo, not Lewis Quitar, but I love Bayleck and Abigail Washburn. Full disclosure, they're friends of mine. But I think they're brilliant, brilliant. I think they're playing some of the best bluegrass in the world today. I love their joint albums and I've had a chance to hear them up close playing. And it's magic. It's magic.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “It's amazing, it's absolutely amazing. I know some of my colleagues have critiqued it, but it was so beautifully done. I mean, I'm a huge Ralph Fines fan. I think he's gorgeous, but the sort of gruff everyman who, you know, this is his obsession. It's what he's good at, the care with which he digs, the passion, even the scene at the end where they're all backfilling. Like they got it right. They really got it right. It shows kind of what a dig is like. And also all the drama that happens around an excavation season, not necessarily, you know, in the backdrop of war, that's how we always dig. But certainly the relationships, the complexities, how people are interacting with each other, the pressures from local authorities. I think it's one of the best archaeology movies that's ever been done. So if you haven't seen it yet, definitely go see it. It's done pretty well rating-wise. But I think underrated in the sense that not enough people know about it yet.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “First Indiana Jones is problematic as I know it is. I know, I know, I know, but I can't help it. I mean, that's, you know, like so many archaeologists who are in their 40s and 50s, that's one of the things that inspired me to go into the field. So yeah, definitely the first indie movie.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I am super biased. I think Harrison gets the exact amount of credit he deserves. So I guess kind of neither. I have the chance to meet him a few years ago at TED conference and he was an absolutely delightful, delightful human being and very kind and very generous. So I don't want to say overrated or underrated. I think he's very much appreciated.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Underrated. It's amazing. It's like they use all of these extraordinary fresh local ingredients the most, they have the most incredible tomatoes in the whole world. They taste of magic and sunshine, eggplant, potatoes, onions, garlic, buffalo, lamb, beef. It's just that stews and the most amazing rosewater infused pastries. I am getting hangry right now thinking about it. The cooks there, especially we get our food at Lisch made by these amazing local women. And my dig ting complains because they always put on weight. The food is so good. So totally underrated. Anyone listening, go to your local Egyptian restaurant. You will thank me.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “He liked to make up a lot of stories. And to me, he's like you're slightly drunk uncle at Thanksgiving and you're like, oh God, Uncle Herodotus again, like you can believe a grain of what he says and you have to like, how much is the truth really? So yeah, I rely on the archaeology, not as much with Herodotus, with apologies to my classical colleagues.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Follow the rules in that country. But yeah, a lot of issues now around intellectual property at universities, who owns this data, how is it being used? Is it being monetized? And again, these are complicated questions.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Their discovery. The Egyptian government is the one that has to make that announcement. Now, obviously, you can choose pictures from your sites. That's fine. You can show ongoing pictures of work. But if you do make a major discovery between the government of Egypt has that right, because of course they do. This is their heritage. And the rules are similar in other places. So we have to respect the laws. Otherwise, we won't get the ability to work. But sometimes you do end up making an amazing discovery of randomly years and years ago when we were doing survey work in Sinai, we ended up finding a dinosaur. I always get asked, oh, archaeologists, don't you do dinosaurs? I'm like, no, but actually, yes, kind of. So that was wild, right? Who finds a dinosaur? It was actually a mesosaur. I think my eight-year-old son could tell you much more about the mesosaur than I could. I don't really do dinosaurs with apologies to my colleagues who are listening right now who do. But of course, we turned over that information immediately to the local university and we let the government know you do make unexpected fines and stuff to.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “So, I mean, I've learned a lot the hard way with all of my work. I come worked in 14 or 15 countries to date. I've made a lot of mistakes. So if my colleagues, we're just, it's always a learning process. And it's always a process of negotiation. So first of all, when you ask for permission to work in a place, you're negotiating, okay, I'd like to do things A through G. And the government may turn around and go, okay, you can do A through D. And if you do them well, you can do ENF next year. And do anyone ever think about G. Or maybe in the future? So there's a negotiation to even do the work and process the fines or dig or survey or map or whatever you're proposing to do. And you're also negotiating with your colleagues over rights to publish. You certainly have the right to publish your research, but ultimately who owns that data? So just as an example, in Egypt, it is illegal for a foreigner working in Egypt to make a major announcement about”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “And while I may have very strong feelings about things that are happening in particular places, if I speak out against them or take a side, then that government will say, see you later. And so we're always balancing good versus harm. What is the good that I can do by continuing my work in this place to be an advocate for heritage and to educate and empower all these local communities and all these people because they're the ones ultimately that are going to be the stewards and I lose my power to do that if I say something. So empowering in itself and training and educating and doing the outreach, that's the radical work of what we do. Ultimately, it's up to the people who live in these places. But yeah, this is a real thorny issue and one we're going to be hearing about again and again, of course, with the rise of nationalism around the world.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “to prove that oh we're older we're better or this particular religious group was here first hence we have a right to do these commit these atrocities or erase these peoples we see this everywhere we see this all over the world and so oftentimes archaeologists will find themselves caught up in political controversies they're like hey i i'm just digging up this site why are you bothering me look at what's happened in in england in the last few days the government's come out with a very strong statement against academics and museums saying you know you can't erase”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “A great question. I joke with people who say, oh, would you ever be interested in going into politics? And I say all the skeletons in my closet are real. No, thank you. And yet archaeology is inherently political by its very nature, right? Anytime you contend with the past, interpreting how that past impacts who we are today. Just a very recent example from the January 6th insurrection, you know, we saw people dressed up as Viking-esque, indigenous coast players, symbols from the Vikings and from the classical world have been co-opted by far-right extremist groups for years and years and years. So we see it here in our own country, certainly around the world, concepts of ownership. Who came to a place first? Who has the right to be living in this place? And governments will use discoveries from archaeological sites.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “We have to look at the incentives around who's paying for destruction to happen and the value of that thing in the community and kind of flip it around. There have been a lot of instances where archaeological sites all over the world have been threatened, cultural sites, and the local communities have risen up and protested and protected the site. So I think this is more about empowering local communities and getting them to understand that they're the stewards, they're the guardians, because in so many countries there aren't enough archaeologists, right? You know, the arts and culture are chronically underfunded all around the world. They're only a fraction of a percent of most countries' budgets. And so people feel disconnected from their history. So how do we change the global dialogue around the value of archaeology and history and empower communities to want to protect their histories and show them how they're connected to it?”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “So, this is really difficult. And, you know, these are issues that we contend with all the time in the field, whether we're anthropologists or political scientists or archaeologists or anytime we're doing work in a foreign area, to what extent do you intervene when you see things that are problematic going on? And, you know, for example, with all the work I've done with mapping, looting around archaeological sites in Egypt, I've shared all that information with the government of Egypt. And at that point, I'm done. I can advocate, I can try to be an ally, I can try to talk to them about best practices or things to be thinking about. But ultimately, it's the governments in these places that are responsible for protecting the sites or not. And there is, as you know, massive corruption around the world. And if a wealthy local landowner wanted that plaza or that pyramid to build whatever and they pay a bribe of $1,000 or $10,000 or whatever it is, that thing's going.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “In Dubai via dealer in Paris or dealer in New York, and they specifically said, we want X, Y, and Z objects from these types of sites. And so someone will come to the village and say, I will pay each of you $20 a night to go loot. And that's very different. They work much faster. It's very dangerous. They can loot a tomb in a night. And these are people that dig down 40 or 50 feet into a shaft tomb. So again, we have to understand the kinds of looting that are happening in different places in the world. And people loot because they need money, right? And it's not a black or white issue villagers aren't getting rich off of this stuff. It's the collectors. It's the middlemen. It's much bigger questions around shutting down trade and understanding networks. And it's very similar to the International Wildlife Trade or Gun Running or Money Laundering. It's all connected.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “So I've talked a lot to the villagers that work at Lisht because many of them were involved. I mean, not just them, but the people from the shining area, they were involved in looting post-Arab Spring. So in 2011, and I've learned a lot about Kuluts and why they loot and when they loot. So you have to think of archaeological sites in some ways like community piggy banks. And it's not like local people are out digging every day, robbing the site down to nothing. They'll tap it every now and then so someone needs surgery, someone needs to go to school. It's kind of like a gig income. And so post-Arab Spring, the village would, or villagers would organize into collective groups and not just there all over Egypt. And this is kind of how things work across the Middle East. So they organize collectively. They go looted tomb. They'll find whatever they find and then they'll split the proceeds. It's a very different kind of looting than someone comes from Cairo via dealer in Jordan via dealer.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Economic development. I think a lot of people look at looting and they think, oh, it's looting. You're stealing from sites. All these sites are threatened. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but looting has been going on for thousands of years. We have pot shirds from 5,000 years ago in Egypt that were worn down from people digging out tombs of the earliest wealthy burials. People have been stealing from tombs for a very long time as part of the human condition. So I would say economic development and encroachment. It's not particularly sexy at all. It bores people. People want to hear stories of looting because encroachment is much more difficult.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Egyptian government made there were a lot of protests. I'm not in a position, I feel like to criticize what they did, it happened. That was a decision they made. They felt it was best for their own heritage, and I think we have to listen very carefully to foreign governments in places where we work. But yeah, this is a problem all over the world. What do we do? Do you just evict families with kids who've, and these communities, right? That's the other important thing. These are communities. And they're not all stealing from these sites. They just happen to live there. So this is a big question and one that I think we'll be dealing with for the next hundred or more years.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Working relationships with local villagers because ultimately they're the ones who are the stewards and guardians of these sites and they've many cases never had a chance to connect with these places and there's a lot of economic opportunity there so I think we have to tread very carefully in a lot of instances the people who are living on or necocytes are related to the people who live there thousands of years ago so you know as inconvenient as it might be that their houses are there these are human beings and they've lived in these places for a very very long time so how do you deal with these situations sensitively and we're having a lot of really difficult conversations right now certainly you know in egypt and luxor and the village that was on top of a lot of the tombs of the new kingdom the egyptian government basically evicted the folks who are living there a lot of the tombs had been damaged and now they're conserving the tombs and that's a decision that the ministry of antiquities”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “That's a really interesting question. So, on the screen behind me right now, I don't know if there'll end up being a screenshot of it, and I'm happy to share the image so you can post it on your website. So this is Lesh, and you see behind me we're standing on a almost 4,000-year-old cemetery, but we have the modern cemetery right behind us. So archaeological sites are living places more often than not. It's not like they were abandoned thousands of years ago or hundreds of years ago and people are gone. The local communities living on these sites are next to them are essential. So community archaeology is a really, really important part of the field of archaeology. And I think first and foremost, you know, when we excavate in the field, we're anthropologists, we're cultural anthropologists, so you have to speak the local language. I speak Arabic. I'm not completely fluent, but I know enough. I'm certainly fluent in Egyptian culture on my workforce is Egyptian. My core staff, it's a joint mission with the Ministry of Antiquities. So it means that I have an Egyptian co-director and you have to have really close.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “To the elements. And so a lot of these amazing discoveries from a long time ago are exposed to the elements. And, you know, you look at archaeological sites like Pompeii, where the ministry in Italy, responsible for its conservation, they've been chronically underfunded. I've heard there are potential connections to mafia, lots of corruption. A lot of these amazing houses are almost falling down. So I think conservation and protecting sites needs to be funded as much as new discoveries. And it's not just Italy, right? This is an issue all over the world.”

    2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source