Woman of the Week – Sarah Parcak

Sarah Parcak is an American space archaeologist and Egyptologist who has used satellite images to identify potential sites for archaeological exploration.

In the early 2000s, Parcak studied satellite images and surface surveys to search for potential exploration sites in the former Roman Empire. Some of the sites dated back to 3,000 B.C.

For this work, she earns the title of “space archaeologist” by looking from space for places to dig below the Earth’s surface. Her work involved infrared imagery that can see much more than the naked eye: it can differentiate between potential tombs and piles of rocks before the ground is even explored.

Alongside her husband, Dr. Greg Mumford, she directs Survey and Excavation Projects in the Fayoum, Sinai, and Egypt's East Delta. Her work in Egypt has discovered 17 potentially unknown pyramids, as well as more than one thousand tombs and three thousand settlements. She’s also uncovered the grid of the city of Tanis, the city made famous by Indiana Jones.

In a 2012 TED talk, she explained the process by saying it can find ancient cities that have been missing for thousands of years. Often, the sites had been looked at from above but without working knowledge of an area and its history. She said that, when using the satellites, it’s a requirement to have "deep knowledge of historical events, the geology of how materials degrade over time, topography of landscapes, seasonal weather conditions, and the culture as a whole."

In 2016, she earned the $1 million TED Prize, which she used to further her research. In addition to finding out what happened years ago, the technology can be used to help monitor historic areas in danger of looting and destruction.

After the Arab Spring movement across the Middle East, buzz began about people potentially looting the ancient sites. Parcak has observed that patterns of looting at these sites have increased 500 to 1,000 percent since the Arab Spring. She’s working with governments to try and prevent it from getting worse.

In 2016, she was the recipient of Smithsonian magazine’s American Ingenuity Award in the history category. She’s currently a professor of anthropology and the Director for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.