Today we are witnessing a continuous arrival of relevant news to important archaeological discoveries. As history buffs we enjoy them with the eyes of a child, ready to soak up new historical revelations. Recently the lost city of Luxor in Egypt, or a few days ago a Roman amphitheater with 20,000 spectators under a field of olive trees in Turkey have been discovered thanks to the application of new technologies to the old science of Archaeology.
Newly discovered amphitheater in Turkey (Hurriyet Daily News)
The human being has always been aware that he had a past. Religions were the great protagonists of rummaging through it to find an origin. But we will have to wait until the Renaissance to find the beginnings of a scientific methodology that will bring to light the events that occurred in the past. The examples are varied, and some are as significant as that of Brunelleschi who studied ancient Roman constructions to give us the magnificent dome of the Florence Cathedral.
From that moment the science of Archeology became unstoppable in satisfying the desires of new generations of researchers and historians. In the seventeenth century it was already excavated in Pompeii. The XIX saw the explosion of this science, bringing to light the ancient oriental civilizations. French and English took their wars to the desert to learn the secrets of the dazzling Ancient Egypt. After World War II, dating with the C14 technique gave results as surprising as they were reliable.
But as we well know, in recent years our lives have taken a technological leap that sometimes even scares us. Without realizing it, or yes, but turning a blind eye, a large part of our needs, and even concerns, have been deposited inside our mobile phone. It is evident that Archeology has not been immune to this dazzling progress. If until relatively recently, farmers were the first archaeologists when their picks or hoes collided with a large block of stone, today any of us can become the first archaeologists simply from our computer screen, thanks to tools open to the public like Google Earth. Although we don't have many illusions, as Sarah Parcak says, "it's not as simple as it seems" .
Sarah Parcak, passionate archaeologist
Archeology from space.
Sarah Parcak, the American archaeologist, is one of the best in the world in this field. Recently thanks to the editorial Ariel we can enjoy her new work: Archeology from space. One of the most innovative works of the moment. A work that reveals all the tools that 21st century archaeologists have in their hands, to continue discovering our past.
Sarah Parcak does not blush when stating that the night before she was going to meet Harrison Ford she was up all night. Years before, she had decided to become an archaeologist, after being trapped under the sofa blanket watching In Search of the Lost Ark. After passing through the universities of Yale and Cambridge, she today works as a full professor at the University of Alabama. Activity that she combines with the work of discovering new archaeological remains as a remote sensing archaeologist . By the way, an activity in which she is one of the pioneers in the world and that she emerged after a beautiful relationship with her grandfather.
Harold Young, Sarah's grandfather, was a brilliant captain in the US Army's 101st Airborne Division during World War II. Harold participated in the preparation for D-Day, taking thousands of aerial photographs of the Atlantic Coast. After graduating he went on to study the forests of the whole world with the same technique. The grandfather never spoke to her granddaughter about that war, but he did teach her to analyze aerial photographs. Sarah enjoyed the 3D vision provided by her grandfather's stereoscope. Three years after losing that loving grandfather who never told her about the war, Sarah Parcak decides to join her two passions, the one instilled in her by two of her heroes, Harrison Ford and Harold Young.
Aerial photograph of the Normandy landings.
Archaeology from space.
Spatial Archeology It is not discovering alien farms on the Planet Mars, Sarah Parcak mocks the name she has given to her discipline.
Reading her book suggests that it is not a new discipline, in short, all observation from the air to the earth's crust can be included in this sub-discipline of Archeology . Hence, the North American author suggests us as its origin from the year 1906. When the British Lieutenant Philip Henry flew over the stone circle of Stonehenge with his Zeppelin to photograph it. From that year, as we saw with Sarah's grandfather, aerial photography became one of the main weapons of the two world wars. A technology that is here to stay and be applied to multiple disciplines, including the one that concerns us, Archaeology.
Continuing with the historical process, the Cold War promoted a large number of secret satellite espionage programs. The space began to fill with cameras that continuously took pictures of the surface through high resolution images. In 1995, US President Bill Clinton ordered the declassification of millions of images. Since then they have become a “toy” for archaeologists. A "toy" that ended up becoming a gold mine for the Archeology of the Near East. Sarah Parcak boasts about them, pointing out the importance of many of these images, since some of them are prior to the inauguration of the Aswan Dam in Egypt. That, although numerous monuments were saved before it was put into operation, such as the Temple of Debod, which was moved to Madrid, many others were buried under water, as these images attest.
Sarah Parcak, author of Archeology from Space.
The remote sensing technique had already begun to bear fruit beforehand. His baptism of fire occurred in 1982, when archaeologist William McHugh was analyzing images sent by the space shuttle Columbia of the surface of the Eastern Sahara desert. Following images of a river that had been dry since time immemorial, he soon began to see strange objects. Enough to bring to light bones and remains of lithic technology of the Homo Erectus after the relevant excavations. .
Since then, the progress of remote sensing has been constant. The arrival of color in images also favored archaeological work. The most common is to see the different colors of the grass. For example, a wheat field is a simple place to point out remains of walls, it does not grow the same if there is a stony surface under the earth. At that time the technique only lacked precision. That has been the work of the last years. Today we are close, according to Sarah Parcak, to witnessing true science fiction milestones, such as recognizing a small fragment of buried pottery from 600 km away.
Afterword.
Sarah Parcak in her work goes far beyond the history of Spatial Archaeology. And in addition to inviting us to spend a day with her in her passionate work, she dares to move us in one of her episodes to a future of Archaeology. In it, she sees her future colleagues at the controls of Robbie, a robot that in turn is in command of an impressive army of drones, which in a matter of minutes crumbles 5000 years of history of a burial mound located in the Middle East. . As you read it, inevitably a kind of dehumanizing sadness overwhelms you. So that in the end Sarah reveals to us her fear that scientific progress in her field will come to a standstill.
Sarah Parcak with her husband, also an archaeologist, in Luxor, Egypt.
Sarah Parcak has passionately written her work, something that certainly reflects her passion for her work. Hand in hand with her, with Archeology from space we will tour the entire world, Egypt, Burma, Turkey, Iceland, Afghanistan, Central America, Scotland, or your own country USA, are just a few examples. In all of them, he reveals the secrets that his work has brought to light:Viking houses, Roman amphitheaters, Khmer temples, Mayan buildings, or countless buildings from Ancient Egypt, where, by the way, he moves like a fish in water. . Her work has received great recognition, in such a way that some of her fellow travelers have been prestigious entities of historical disclosure, such as National Geographic or the English BBC.
Archeology from space in Historioteca.