Greg Mumford
Sarah Parcak in the field.
Sarah Parcak, a space archaeologist who looks for ancient sites with satellite imagery (she's often called the "Indiana Jones from space") just revealed a plan at the 2016 TED conference in Vancouver to let anyone hunt for undiscovered and looted ancient archaeological sites using a computer.
Parcak won this year's TED Prize, which gives $1 million for recipients to turn a big wish into reality. Her wish: Finding the millions of unknown archaeological sites across the planet by "creating a 21st century army of global explorers."
A professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Parcak is working with the TED Prize team to create an interactive online crowdsourced citizen science platform to find ancient sites and spot looting via satellite images. The platform is set to launch this summer.
Parcak's platform addresses a big global issue. Her team has already mapped 200,000 looting pits in Egypt alone. If we do nothing to stop the problem, she says, all of Egypt's archaeological sites will be looted by 2040. Having help from millions of people across the globe could give a boost to officials and academics who want to prevent further theft.
The platform will first give participants a tutorial on how to evaluate satellite images. Users will then be given a series of images along with general location descriptions (like Southern Iraq). No GPS data is revealed in order to protect the sites.
Each image represents a 50 meter by 50 meter area of land that has already been pre-processed with algorithms by Parcak and her team. Users will look for tombs, pyramids, buildings, and signs of looting (they are given examples of what looted sites look like - essentially small dark circles).
TED Prize An archaeological dig in Palmyra, Syria seen via satellite.
"As people start marking things, it will populate a backend system. If 50 people in the crowd say they see what they think looks like a tomb at a site, it's worth it for us to take a look," Parcak said at a briefing before her TED talk.
Once discoveries and looted sites have been verified, they will be shared with local governments and authorities, who can help protect them. And there's a bonus for virtual explorers who make discoveries: they'll have the opportunity to join archaeologists on digs (via Skype, Google Hangouts, or other online platforms).
Parcak suspects that the platform will reveal a network of "super-pattern detectors" - ordinary people who have an eye for finding ancient sites.
"Everywhere people look with satellite imagery, the scale of what we don't know surprises us. There are archaeological sites everywhere. The big problem is that we don't even know the number of known sites in the world. It's pretty shocking," she says.
Satellite imaging technology has improved so much in recent years that the possibility for finding unknown sites has become much greater than in the past, according to Parcak. "The resolution of satellites has improved...so we are able to see so much more then even a few years ago. Also, the spectral resolution has improved so we can see even further into the middle infrared, which allows us to see subtle changes in geology," she recently wrote in an email to Tech Insider.
Parcak is hopeful that the platform will inspire a new generation of archaeology enthusiasts. "We hope that around the world this will allow people not only to engage with discovery but to become archaeological activists," she says.