What I Am Reading: "Archaeology From Space" by Sarah Parcak

Apparently I'm to finish this busy month the same way I started it: reading about archaeology. This book came up in a search after I read 1177 B.C.; I actually remember the author, Dr. Sarah Parcak, from when she was on the Colbert Late Show about a thousand years ago, when he actually had intellectuals on. This book talks about her work as an archaeologist who practices and evangelizes for the use of satellite imagery in archaeology; and is generally an archaeology hype book.

Dr. Parcak's grandfather was a big name in forestry who pioneered the use of aerial photography in that discipline, and though it isn't a direct chain to her use, she thinks that his sense of wonder and passion for discovery, coupled with a childhood love of Indiana Jones, drove some of her work in archaeology. She isn't the first archaeologist to make use of satellite imagery: academics have had the idea since at least the '80s, when there was widespread publicity of readings taken by the space shuttle Columbia revealing an old underground river network in the Sahara. In fact, since the dawn of air travel, archaeological sites have been photographed from the air. This has encompassed both specific archaeological targeting, such as by Antoine Poidebard in the Middle East in the mid-'20s through '30s, or incidental targeting, including the use of wartime surveillance photos. This source repeated in later generations of technology, as archaeologists rushed to use CORONA cold war-era photography after it was declassified in 1995.

This was actually one of my main takeaways from the book: use of satellite photography to identify archaeological sites isn't commissioned specifically, since it would be cost-prohibitive, but is gathered and amalgamated from other, pre-existing data sets. On the satellite front, this reaches back to Landsat, the brainchild of Stewart Udall in 1964. As noted, archaeologists have been interested in the use of this data since the '80s, with a conference in 1984 in Mississippi to establish guidelines and familiarize practitioners with the opportunity. Dr. Parcak was a participant as a young student in a subsequent conference in 2004, as the second generation of satellite archaeologists met for international collaboration.

Satellite imagery can be used in a variety of ways, primarily to identify new sites. Beyond the obvious ability to spot existing structures from above, buried structures stunt the growth of foliage above them, creating telltale patterns visible from the air. Crop marks and old riverbeds are recurring targets. There are a few tricks to it, including preferring morning photographs when there is more moisture in the ground, increasing color contrast. Sites can also be spotted through photography in different visual spectrums, allowing differentiation of different chemical signatures. Use of LIDAR is cited often in the book as well.

Other applications include tracking changes in sites, through comparisons to satellite imagery going back to 1972, and aerial imagery preceding that. This can be used to spot looting, or pinpoint sites that may now live under newer structures. Dr. Parcak has spearheaded large-scale projects tracking looting in Egypt (she specializes in Egyptology), which helps with prosecution and enforcement, and can even serve to match recovered antiquities with their original sites, when used in conjunction with database and field work.

This is another important point: satellites are only one part of the process, and Dr. Parcak stresses that they need to be used in conjunction with "ground-truthing." However, she delves into science fiction for a chapter with an image of a future "archaeo-tech" analyzing a site through technology that, while more advanced than that currently available, does exist in some form. This vision involves deploying drones to conduct thermal imaging and hyper-spectral imaging (for chemical identification) of a site, computer programs creating 3D models, robots scanning buried scrolls to read them (something we have apparently already done), and program analysis of a site through machine learning and database comparison; all without having to get one's hands dirty or disturb the site beyond minor sampling. She thinks that this is a possible future for archaeology, efficient and capable of operating at a vastly larger scale but perhaps devoid of a physical connection to the past through digging.

Beyond this technological image, Dr. Parcak has ambitions of broadening access to archaeology, and getting more women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and people from lower-income backgrounds into the field, with their invaluable insights. Archaeology has already seen a broadening of focus as a result of the diversification of practitioners, as focus has turned over the years to excavations of everyday life instead of early archaeologists' treasure hunts through temples and palaces. With an understatedly radical vision, Dr. Parcak says,

"Archaeologists function as cultural memory hoarders, the khaki-wearing bards singing the songs of cultures long absorbed back into the earth, hoping people pause for a moment and listen. Digging is, for me, a great act of rebellion, against capitalism, the patriarchy, you name it. Because at our core, archaeologists believe that everyone in the past is worth learning about: rich and poor, mighty and weak. It's not about skin color or whether someone was an immigrant or grew up on the wrong side of the donkey tracks. It's about the human story.” (Ch.10)

Beyond explanations of satellite archaeology and paeans to the romance of archaeology, Dr. Parcak covers the devastation of looting, a bit of ancient history (Old Kingdom Egypt), lame puns, and many examples of dig sites, in Egypt and Viking sites in Iceland and Newfoundland, that she has worked on by first using satellite imagery. Her democratizing vision led her to create GlobalXplorer, a game that uses crowdsourcing to identify potential archaeological sites through satellite imagery. This is because satellite imagery has vastly increased the number of potential sites compared to the limited resources of fieldwork, so working at scale is necessary, and crowdsourcing allows the public to own a small piece of the work.

This book is a good update on the subject for those of us who are layman and cut in and out of the archaeology newsfeed. Satellite archaeology isn't science fiction: most of its uses are similar to the use of satellites in other fields, such as climate monitoring and urban design and those sorts of things. Its a smart tool to make use of, and Dr. Parcak's vision for its use goes beyond hype and tech-enthusiasm to a well thought-out tool of social change. It's all a little TED-talky (literally, her funding for the crowdsourcing project came from a TED grant), but I appreciate the optimism, and maybe this modest vision could be an actual example of techno-utopianism paying off.