Archaeology from Space

Last Friday Stephen Colbert hosted Dr. Sarah Parcak, space archaeologist, as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Dr. Parcak is an associate professor of Anthropology and director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 

She recently won a $1 million 2016 TED prize for her talk on Archaeology from Space. She was an animated guest as she discussed the multiple sites her team has uncovered using satellite infrared imagery, including sites outside Rome and in Egypt.  

Here is the content of her TED talk if you want to learn a little more about her efforts:

When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck. But you know, these shells, they're hard to find. They're covered in sand, they're difficult to see. However, over time, I got used to looking for them. I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them. 

This grew into a passion for finding things, a love for the past and archaeology. And eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile. And my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities. This is really what brought me to using satellite imagery. For trying to map the past, I knew that I had to see differently.

So I want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared. This is a site located in the eastern Egyptian delta called Mendes. And the site visibly appears brown, but when we use the infrared and we process it, all of the sudden, using false color, the site appears as bright pink. What you are seeing are the actual chemical changes to the landscape caused by the building materials and activities of the ancient Egyptians.

What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years. Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom, about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important, because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion. Egyptologists have always known the site of Itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it, indicated within the red circles here, but somewhere within this massive flood plain. This area is huge -- it's four miles by three miles in size. The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city.

So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, wearing baseball mitts.

(Laughter)

So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow. But you can see in more detail, and even more interesting, this very slight raised area seen within the circle up here which we thought could possibly be the location of the city of Itjtawy.

So we collaborated with Egyptian scientists to do coring work, which you see here. When I say coring, it's like ice coring, but instead of layers of climate change, you're looking for layers of human occupation. And, five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery. What this shows is that at this possible location of Itjtawy, five meters down, we have a layer of occupation for several hundred years, dating to the Middle Kingdom, dating to the exact period of time we think Itjtawy is. We also found work stone -- carnelian, quartz and agate that shows that there was a jeweler's workshop here. These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used.

So, we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the Middle Kingdom at this site. We also have evidence of an elite jeweler's workshop, showing that whatever was there was a very important city. No Itjtawy was here yet, but we're going to be returning to the site in the near future to map it out. And even more importantly, we have funding to train young Egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well.

So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom -- it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago. "Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings. There's nothing like it in the land." So as it turns out, TED was not founded in 1984 AD.

(Laughter)

Making ideas actually started in 1984 BC at a not-lost-for-long city, found from above. It certainly puts finding seashells by the seashore in perspective.

 Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

TED Video: Project Orion

If you have a few minutes, you should watch the fascinating video from TED where George Dyson describes Project Orion, a planned mission funded by the United States Air Force (USAF) in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  George's father, Freeman Dyson, was part of the team working on the mission.  NASA wanted nothing to do with it.

As Mr. Dyson explains, this highly classified project was designed to put a man on Saturn, a feat that no one really talked about since given our difficulty in even envisioning a manned trip to Mars.  In the video, Mr. Dyson describes a Marriott hotel-sized, 8 million ton, nuclear-bomb propelled (2,000 to 3,000 bombs required) space craft that would take approximately 8 passengers to a moon of Saturn, possibly Io, Ganymede, Enceladus, Titan, or Mimas.   A larger version was also being planned for Jupiter that could carry a crew of 7 with room for an additional 7 scientists.  

The Orion Project was halted in 1965, most likely in reaction to the new restrictions under the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.  But what  an amazing tale of big ideas, and, I suppose, silly ideas given the planned fuel.  However, Mr. Dyson claims the design may be one of the few off-the-shelf ideas for intercepting a planet killer asteroid, which may be why NASA has purchased some of the material from Mr. Dyson's archives (since NASA misplaced its copies, if they were ever shared with them). 

Mr. Dyson tells more in his 2002 book

The improbable story of the wildest idea-a space craft powered by hydrogen bombs-to come out of the space race.

It was the late 1950s. The Cold War was raging. Sputnik had made its voyage and the space race was on. In America, it was the age of tail fins and "duck and cover," but it was also a time of big ideas and dreams. On his way to school one day, George Dyson learned of a truly fantastical idea: massive space vehicles that would be powered by explosions of multiple hydrogen bombs. Among the brilliant minds behind this project was George's father, the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson. 

Project Orion chronicles this fascinating episode in U.S. scientific research, while capturing a unique time in American history and culture. The project brought together a cadre of brilliant physicists, the first such assemblage since the Manhattan Project of fifteen years earlier. In an idyllic seaside community in southern California-the very picture of 1950s suburban prosperity-a handful of scientists, tackled a massive project that required the ingenuity of an engineer and the vision of a great theoretician. Their work-ambitious but ultimately futile-took place against the political and cultural backdrop of the Cold War, when nuclear technology spelled both promise and terror.

Dyson's prodigious historical and scientific research, combined with his personal reminiscences and connections, make for a lively, richly detailed narrative.

Three cheers for big ideas, and we can only hope that other highly classified projects are thinking long term about space exploration.  Of course, I would prefer a more open debate with the involvement of NASA rather than some military-only application.  However, as I noted earlier, the USAF seems to prefer its own parallel space program.