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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Sarah Parcak Quotes

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

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.

– Sarah Parcak

Discoveries aren’t made by one person exploring by themselves. And discoveries aren’t made overnight. People don’t see the thousands of hours that go into it.

– Sarah Parcak

The map we made of the 3,000-year-old city of Tanis requires no imagination. It has buildings, streets, admin complexes, houses – clear as day.

– Sarah Parcak

To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

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

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

We have so many thousands of sites to find across the globe and new techniques to test. The field keeps evolving with the technology, which makes things exciting.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

Less than 1 percent of ancient Egypt has been discovered and excavated. With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we’re in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past?

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

A lot of people are surprised when I talk so much about the present, but politics is just a crucial part of archaeology.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

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

– Sarah Parcak

I already find pyramids from space. Is there anything cooler than that?

– Sarah Parcak

‘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

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

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.

– Sarah Parcak

Getting permission to use a drone in Egypt was problematical.

– Sarah Parcak

It’s absolutely critical, you know, to train young men and women not just to find sites, but also to protect sites, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring. There’s been significant site-looting in Egypt and elsewhere across the Middle East.

– Sarah Parcak

We can tell from the imagery a tomb was looted from a particular period of time, and we can alert INTERPOL to watch out for antiquities from that time that may be offered for sale.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

Seeing sites and features in places where we never looked or never thought things might exist is causing archaeologists across the world to think deeper about their sites or entire cultures.

– Sarah Parcak

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.

– Sarah Parcak

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