A biography for Sarah Parcakhasn’t been written yet.
“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've always loved teaching and reading and talking to people, and my grandfather was a professor.”
“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.”
“What if Hiram Bingham had the technology to find hundreds of other archaeological sites at the same time and create entire 3-D maps of the ancient landscape accurate to within a few inches?”
“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.”
“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.”
“I played varsity soccer at Yale and continued playing at Cambridge.”
“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.”
“The most exciting moment as an archaeologist happened when I was looking at the great archaeology site of Tannis, which of course we all know from 'Indiana Jones.' We got satellite imagery of the city of Tannis, we processed it, and literally from thousands of miles away from my lab in Alabama, we were able to map the entire city.”
“We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?”
“Satellite datasets like WorldView can see objects as small as 1.5 feet in diameter. In 2014, WorldView-3 will be able to see objects a small as a foot.”
“Archaeology holds all the keys to understanding who we are and where we come from.”
“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.”
“We want to excite the world about what's out there. But we don't want them to say, 'Oh, there are lots of sites in Egypt - let's loot.'”
“It's both Indiana Jones and 'National Geographic' that inspired me to be an Egyptologist.”
“Looting speaks to a lack of economic opportunities - frankly, we all would loot, too, if our families' continued survival depended on it.”
“I'm an Egyptologist. I'm a remote sensing specialist, and I'm a space archaeologist.”
“Getting permission to use a drone in Egypt was problematical.”
“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.”
“My dream is to map every archaeological site in the world because, if we can do that, then we have this massive global data base that all sorts of global heritage organizations and heritage organizations within countries can use, and they can use that information to protect what's there.”