![]() What has been your favorite archeological finding so far, and what made it especially important to you? Over 700 of those 29,000 features are major sites Our goal is to map the world in the next 10 years. Since 2017, 80,000+ GlobalXplorers from over 100 countries have examined 14 million satellite images, uncovered 29,000+ anthropogenic features, mapped 700+ previously unknown major archaeological sites in Peru, and created the conditions for our archaeological partner in Peru to discover a new set of Nasca lines. We started the platform in Peru and will continue to India and beyond. The website we run, is an online citizen science satellite archaeology platform that allows anyone in the world, ages 5-105, to look at satellite imagery and help us find sites. PARCAK: Globalxplorer or “GX” is a not for profit focused on using innovative technologies to empower the world to help map and protect its collective global heritage. ![]() Also, the ideas of resilience and creativity are as old as we are-archaeology can and should give us a lot more hope for where we might be headed.Ĭan you tell us a bit about GlobalXplorer and why is it important for people who are not archaeologists to be involved? There is no one solution to any of those challenges, and studying the past enriches our ability to handle them, and in some cases, solve them. Studying archaeology allows us to contextualize all the bad and all the good and reframe how we deal with issues like climate change, migration, or societal collapse. We are still the same race that left Africa-we think we have “modern” problems, but access to good food, water and healthcare, family issues, finding a nice place to raise your kids, and dealing with bad leaders are all issues as old as we are. We have to preserve the past to be able to learn more about it. We have this mistaken assumption that humanity has evolved significantly in hundreds of thousands of years. PARCAK: I feel like the past has so many valuable lessons to teach us today-from faith, to climate change, to pandemics-previous civilization have been through so much. Why is the preservation of past monuments, structures, and civilizations vital to you as an individual? Perhaps they can help us determine what aspects of our being best define us, what parts of civilization are integral, and what it means to be human. There are great lessons to be learned from the civilizations of the past. Parcak also addresses the importance of the field in our lives today. For example, Parcak relates how this fledgling approach has been used to determine the existence of more than 18,000 potential sites where people once dwelled in the Amazon basin, an area once largely considered to be incapable of habitation. It has already helped to identify thousands of new sites and change long held assumptions. While space archaeology is new, it is evolving and growing rapidly. A recipient of the Ted Award, she used her grant to establish GlobalXplorer, an initiative designed to utilize the action of the masses to aid in the discovery of new sites of archaeological relevance. She authored the very first textbook utilized in the study of space archaeology, Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology (Routledge, 2009). She also currently serves as the founding director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. ![]() ![]() Parcak is a National Geographic Society Archaeology Fellow and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Pioneers in the field of space archaeology, she and her team are responsible for locating more than 1,000 hidden tombs, 3,000 forgotten settlements, around 17 pyramids, and, last but not least, the famed Egyptian city of Tanis, whose treasures rival those of King Tut. Having earned degrees at both Yale and Cambridge universities, Parcak currently serves as a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Past winners include scientific giants such as Edward O. ![]() First offered in 1959, the award encourages literate and scholarly interpretations of the physical and biological sciences and mathematics. The award recognizes superior books by scientists written to illuminate aspects of science for a broad readership. A riveting exposure to the novel field of space archaeology, Sarah Parcak’s Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past (Henry Holt and Co., 2019) is the 2020 recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. ![]()
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