YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Parcak

lines on the record: 71
first: 2021-03-24
most recent: 2021-03-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That is a wonderful question. Wow, no one's ever asked me that before. What is the greatest archaeological mistake? That's a hard question because there have been a lot of mistakes. I don't know about the biggest mistake. I think I have my own personal opinion, but I don't speak on behalf of my colleagues for this one. I think when archaeologists go into the field, they don't pair conservation alongside excavation. In other words, they'll dig and then whatever they've excavated, they won't protect or they won't solidify or they won't take the necessary steps to make sure that whatever they've excavated. This is in every case, by the way. But in a lot of cases, and especially from 100, 100 years ago and up to maybe 20, 25 years ago, when this wasn't as much of a priority, these things were left exposed.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fully examined. So there are hundreds of thousands, millions of manuscripts from these places and people are archivists and they go and they study them and they scan them and these these have not been digitized. It's one of, I think, one of the urgent, urgent projects because so many of these manuscript collections were burned by entities like ISIL. So yeah, I think still, you know, alongside the archaeological discoveries we make in the ground, which in some cases may include manuscripts, I think one of the great treasure troves unexplored treasure troves of the world are these manuscript archives where who knows who knows what we'll find there.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so kind of getting back to what I said before about new scanning tools and technologies and infrared being able to read burnt scrolls, there have been so many, of course, manuscripts lost over time to things like fire. I think a lot about what was lost at the Library of Alexandria, but also so many manuscripts are Palimpsest. In other words, they have these ancient texts on them. And then ancient scribes would have erased them or scraped away the old texts, or they would have been faded and they wrote new texts on top of them. So there's a lot of papyrus, a lot of scrolls that were reused over time. And through this scanning, we're able to see new sections of stories or, you know, maybe stories from the Bible or older versions of stories from the Bible. So, yeah, and also there are massive, massive manuscript collections in Iraq, in Syria, and Afghanistan, in Egypt, and so many other places that have never been”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who knows? Who knows? There's not been a thing found. But, you know, I think, for example, I've dipped my toe in the Viking world, and I certainly think over time, we are going to find more evidence for the Vikings. Certainly, I think they made it down to New England. I don't think that's too implausible. You know, they weren't that far away in Newfoundland. And we also, we have evidence of a biking coin that was founded at a site in Maine. Did it mean that the Vikings made it to Maine? Could it have been long distance trade? Who knows? But I certainly think they would have explored. So yeah, so I think the Phoenicians, you know, certainly very well known for sailing around the Mediterranean, but how far they actually got, you know, that just depends on the archaeological data.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of this long distance trade. So certainly as more and more tools and techniques and technologies keep being applied, we're going to find out more about how far people were able to go. The Phoenicians did not make it all the way.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So yeah, so I think more and more constantly gets being discovered about how far a field people traveled. And I think the Phoenicians were extraordinary sailors and had amazing shipbuilding techniques. But I think we can frame this in terms of like how far were ancient peoples able to go. And we keep finding, again, using all of these new tools and technologies and techniques, we keep finding archaeological evidence for all of this amazing long distance trade that goes back to 3000 BC, so 5,000 years ago or more, but certainly all over the Mediterranean, it's amazing to think that, for example, in the time of Cleopatra, there was contact between Egypt and India. And we know this because there are archaeological sites along the Red Sea coast, in particular the site of Maranike, where we know for sure there's archaeological evidence.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't there like an Atlantis in the Bahamas? That's about the least crazy one. So Atlantis was a myth. It was invented by Plato. It was meant to serve as a kind of a lesson. If you read the text in that way, you know, he's trying to pass on a lesson to his students. Look at this immoral society, look at what could have happened now. I think it was probably loosely based on Santorini, you know, Plato certainly would have been aware of Santorini and what happened with the eruption. So I think you could loosely say, yeah, it's kind of Santorini-ish. So the site of Aquiteria, you know, this great volcanic explosion that impacted the archaeology of not just that island and Thera, but the whole region. So yeah, it's, you know, people are looking for it, but it's just, I keep telling people, you need to stop. It doesn't, it doesn't really exist.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“believed that when they died these things were the spirits within these things would accompany them to the afterlife and it wasn't just about building a tomb and putting goods in it that was just one step you needed to make sure that during your life you married and you had children so that in particular your sons could carry on rituals they could carry on making offerings to your spirit in the afterlife that was really important so for a lot of these tombs especially at sites like lesh we find shrines so people could come and and think of it kind of like a mexican day of the dead your family could come and picnic and make offerings so that that was just as important as the grave goods”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for Frank, the ancient Egyptians, I mean, this is what they believed. It's really hard, and I teach this in a lot of my archaeology classes and talk about this when I give lectures. We're also biased and we're all in such modern mindsets about religion and even really religious people. You sort of roll your eyes sometimes. You're like, you really, because you're not acting like that. But for the ancient Egyptians, their religion was the way, was their entire worldview. It's how they interacted with their world. So the wind wasn't the wind. It was the god Shu touching them. The Nile wasn't the Nile. It was the God happy. And so in many ways, if we think of their religion in some ways as their science and how they understood the changes in the world around them, I think that's kind of how we can better understand why they did what they did and why they believed what they believed. They believe this stuff. And so for them, they genuinely...”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Graves maybe cut into shallowly into the bedrock or in sand. But it's interesting so that the archaeological site where I work at Lisht, which dates to about 3,800 years ago, 1800 BC, we find a full range of burials, everything from the most elite down to probably lower, lower middle class burials, and even the lower middle class individuals still would have been buried with something. So you wanted to, that was to prepare you for the afterlife.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you want to prepare the body and the soul for eternity, and you want to make sure that you equip the people being buried with enough items to kind of get them through the afterlife, because for the ancient Egyptians, death was really the beginning. It was your entree into eternity. And so, of course, you'd need things like a bed and linen and food and jewelry. And, you know, you would have been buried with hundreds of little shubteys, these little work figures that would have worked for you in the afterlife. So you needed these grave goods to essentially allow you to keep living your life after death. And in particular, if you were a wealthy person from the time you were a young adult, you would have begun preparing your burial. Only the most wealthy, most elite could afford very high-end tombs. Most people would have been buried in simple, simple.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time and we're going to learn about religious practices, about their relationships. I'm sure a lot of the mummies and coffins will end up getting cat scanned so we'll be able to learn about disease, how old were they when they died? What was their diet like? You know, were they eating better than the average population? These mostly men in their, I don't know, 50s, 60s, were they women? Are there women that are buried there? Are they related to each other? So we're able to really get a much better picture about kind of religion and the types of people that would have worked in temples. So there's a lot we can get from them.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's work that's ongoing by my esteemed colleagues at Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities. And what's always amazing when you find these large corpuses, these large groups of coffins that are buried together is we learn an amazing amount about daily life. It seems based on a lot of the initial work that I've seen, and I was very lucky one of my last trips before the pandemic started was going to Egypt for meetings with my colleagues. And a number of these coffins were on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. So I got to see them and read some of the inscriptions. And they're just absolutely stunning. But it seems like it was a burial for priests who were living and working around Sakara. So they dated to roughly 3,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago, sort of this post-new kingdom imperial age into the Ptolemaic period. So a little bit later.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, that was just straight up, and they put blocks up on one side. But we do have multiple grants that are still in situ. So we have a pretty good sense of how they're built. And of course, construction changed over time. So as we apply new science, new scanning, tools and technologies, we're just going to continue to learn more. But they were built by amazing engineers and architects and by a lot of people, tens of thousands of people.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing very much, and so the pharaoh organized sort of a massive state work project so the pyramids were not built by slaves. There was a professional workforce, but you also needed a lot of very strong younger men to help move the blocks. And for the ancient Egyptians, it was service work. It was sort of like a national, I guess an ancient WPA and a national works project. And for them to go, you're serving your pharaoh, but also you're getting choice cuts of beef, your living very well, you're eating well, you're drinking well. In essence, you're paid. And you get to go back to your village and brag that you help to build them. So they were moved by large numbers of people and they would compete against each other. Actually, we have inscriptions inside the pyramids that make reference to the drunkards of Menkaura. So they sort of named there. It was like an ancient sports team. They would compete against each other to move blocks. So they moved them up ramps. We don't know exactly exactly how they were built. You know, was it a ramp mechanism around the exterior? Was it a ramp mechanism?”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So a lot of person power, but also extraordinary engineering. When you stand in front of the pyramids today, so of course everyone thinks of the great pyramids of Giza, but there are over 100 pyramids in Egypt, a lot of them don't look like the pyramids of Giza. Those are the most well, among the most well-preserved ones. You stand there and you go, oh my gosh, these are hundreds of feet tall, they're millions of blocks. Each block weighs tons and tons. How is this even possible? And even me as an Egyptologist, I visited them dozens of times. I still stand and am in awe when I see them for the first time every time I land in Egypt. They're an extraordinary marvel. But when you get really, really close and you look at each individual block, you start seeing the hundreds and hundreds of little chisel marks. And you're like, oh, it's person power. So in Egypt, for three to four months of the year, certainly in ancient Egypt, it was a time period when the Nile was flooded. And so there were a lot of people all over Egypt who were kind of idling, not really.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All these new tools to use looking at the past, we're far better able to understand all of their diverse technologies. And of course, we only ever uncover a thousandth of a percent, a teeny tiny fraction of a percent of all that comes from the past, what was left, what was melted down, what was traded, what was repurposed. So I think, and I think my colleagues would agree, we are in a golden age of archaeological discovery right now. I mean, look at all these amazing headlines that we keep seeing in the paper. So I think we're going to see some of the most incredible archaeological discoveries ever found in the next few decades.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think we're going to be continuously amazed at what we find about the past. We assume we know so much about how pyramids were built or how people in the past calculated time or distance or their construction techniques. And now with so many advances in our own abilities to interpret the past, whether it's through infrared skinning technologies, we're able to read burnt scrolls from places like Herculaneum, whether it's new and far more accurate dating techniques, whether it's new DNA studies where we're able to understand, you know, not just that, okay, this group of mummies that was excavated in Egypt 100 years ago, we know that the royal, now we know how they're related to each other. So I think with our own application of physics and chemistry and biology and computation machine learning put”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of civilizations in the Late Bronze Age, whether it's Egypt circa 2200 BC, which is the end of their great pyramid age, when you look at the Khmer civilization in Cambodia around 1000 AD, most of those cultures in some way, shape or form still continued or continue to this day. Look at the Maya in Central America. So we have to ask ourselves, what is collapsing? So I prefer the word evolve. Evolution can be good or can be bad, but we have to ask what survives and how and what is collapsing now and what's making people so uncomfortable. So, you know, I think ultimately when we look at the past, when we try to understand what's going on, I think we can get a lot of lessons for today and what might survive.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So yeah, so this is something I think a lot about and actually is the subject of a book that I'm working on right now. So when we say collapse, you know, we think of post-apocalyptic, whether it's a zombie movie or mad max, you know, visions of bearded men riding around in the desert with cars with flames coming out of them, fighting over scant resources. Civilization is gone. We really have to deconstruct that particular framing and terminology. And what does it mean when you say collapse? Who are you trying to scare? And when you really break it down, it's collapse of what and for whom. And I think that when we say collapse, it's systems collapse for the most elite of society. And when we look back at the archaeological record, when we look at when diverse civilizations, quote-unquote, collapsed or had these systems break down, you know, whether it's multiple”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great, great question. So 1200 BC, things were sort of very similar to the way things are now. There were global climate issues that led to significant reductions in people's ability to access resources. There were numerous wars, internal conflicts, a lot of pressure around migration. And so when you think about what's happening today with the pandemic and then so much that's happening, I think that things are not quite identical, but close. So yeah, I think it's climate change, it's social, political, and economic pressure all kind of combining together. And I think of the work of my colleague, Professor Eric Klein, in his book, 1177 BC, why civilization collapsed. So I recommend that. I always like recommending my colleagues books as well who focused on this stuff.”
2021-03-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Sarah Parcak on Archaeology from Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source