hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm very happy to be chatting with sarah park i think of her as the space archaeologist she is a professor at the university of alabama at birmingham she has been part of numerous
television productions about archaeology and i very much liked her book archaeology from space how the future shapes our past sarah welcome thank you so much for having me excited to be here let's start with an easy question 1200 bc why was there a late bronze age collapse
that's a great great question um so the 1200 bc uh things were uh very similar to to uh the way things are now um there were global climate issues that led to significant reductions in people's ability to access resources there were there were numerous wars internal
conflicts a lot of pressure around migration and so you know when you think about what's happening today with the pandemic uh and then so much that's happening um you know i think that things are not quite identical but but close so yeah i think it's it's climate change
uh it's social political and economic pressure all kind of combining together um and i think of the work of my colleague professor eric klein um in his book um 1177 bcy civilization collapsed so i recommend that i always like recommending my colleagues books as well for
who focused on this stuff as an archaeologist how is it you understand collapse so a lot of bad things happened a lot of bad things are happening now but right now it seems we'll lose a lot of lives that's terrible we lose a lot of gdp and jobs that's terrible but we're
probably not going to collapse so what is it that induces collapse and how much do we know about that from an archaeological point of view so yeah so this is something i think a lot about and actually um is is the subject of a book that i'm working on
right now um so this when we say collapse you know we think of post-apocalyptic whether it's a zombie movie or or mad max you know visions of bearded men riding around in the desert with cars with flames coming out of them fighting over scant resources civilization is gone um but
we really have to deconstruct that that particular framing and terminology i mean what does it mean when you say collapse who are you trying to scare and when you really break it down you know it's collapse of what and for whom and i think that when we say collapse
it's systems collapse for the most elite of society and when we look back at the archaeological record when we look at when diverse civilizations quote unquote collapsed or had these systems break down you know whether it's multiple societies civilizations in the
late bronze age whether it's egypt um circa 2200 bc which is the end of their great pyramid age uh when you look at the khmer civilization in cambodia around 1000 a.d um you know most most of those cultures in some way shape or form still continued or continue to this day
look look at the mayan central america so we have to ask ourselves what is collapsing so i i prefer the word evolve evolve com evolution can be good or can be bad but we have to ask what survives and how and what is collapsing now uh and what's making people so uncomfortable um
so you know i think we're the ultimately when we look at the past we try to understand what's going on um you know i think we can get get a lot of lessons for today and what might survive how accurate do you think is our picture of available technologies in the late
bronze age how much do we know how much do we not know so people discover this computation mechanism from ancient greece no one expected that are we just totally in the dark and we're going to be shocked for the next few centuries or do we more or less have it right no i
i think i think we're going to be you know continuously amazed at um you know what we find about the past you know we we assume we know so much about you know how pyramids were built or how people in the past calculated time or distance um or or their construction techniques
and now with so many advances in our own abilities to interpret the past you know whether it's through you know infrared scanning technologies you know we're able to read burnt scrolls from places like herculaneum um whether it's new and far more accurate dating techniques
whether it's new dna studies where we're able to understand you know not just that okay this group um of mummies that was excavated in egypt 100 years ago we know that they're royal now we know how they're related to each other so i think with with our own application
of physics and chemistry and biology and computation machine learning putting all these new tools to use looking at the past we're far better able to understand all of their diverse technologies and of course we only ever uncover you know a thousandth of a percent a teeny tiny
fraction of a percent of all that comes from the past you know what was what was left what was melted down what was traded what was repurposed so i i think and i think my colleagues would agree we are in a golden age of archaeological discovery right now i mean look at all these
amazing headlines that we keep seeing in the paper so i think we're going to see some of the most incredible archaeological discoveries ever found in the next few decades so how were the great pyramids built now that you bring it up so uh so a lot of
uh a lot of of of person power but also extraordinary engineering you know when you stand in front of the pyramids today so of course everyone thinks of the great pyramids of giza but they're over 100 pyramids in egypt a lot of them don't look like the pyramids of giza those are the most
well among the most well preserved ones you stand there and you're oh my gosh you know these are hundreds of feet tall they're millions of blocks each block weighs tons and tons how is this even possible and even me as an egyptologist i've visited them
dozens of times i still stand and am in awe when i see them for the first time every time i land in egypt they're they're an extraordinary marvel but when you get really really close um and you look at each individual block you start seeing the hundreds and hundreds of little
chisel marks and you're like oh it's person power um so in egypt um for for three to four months of the year certainly in ancient egypt it was um a time period when the nile was flooded and so there were a lot of people all over egypt who were kind of idling
not not really doing very much and so the pharaoh organized sort of a massive state work project so the pyramids were not built by staves the slaves there was a professional workforce but you also needed a lot of very strong younger men to help move the blocks and
for the ancient egyptians it was service work it was sort of like a national i guess an ancient wpa and a national works project and for them to go you're serving your pharaoh but also you're getting choice cuts of beef you're living very well um you're you're you're eating well
you're drinking well in essence you're you're paid um and you get to go back to your village and brag but you helped to to build them so they were moved by large numbers of people um so you and they would compete against each other actually we have inscriptions
inside the pyramids that that uh make reference to the the drunkards of mankaura so you know they sort of named there it's like an ancient sports team they would compete against each other to move blocks so they moved them up ramps um we don't know exactly exactly how
they were built you know was it a rampant rent mechanism around the exterior was it a ram um a mechanism you know that was just straight up and they put blocks up on one side but we do have multiple um grants that are still in situ so we have a pretty good sense of how
they're built and of course construction changed over time so you know as we apply new science new scanning tools and technologies we're just going to continue to learn more but they were built by amazing engineers and architects and by a lot of people tens of thousands of
people so as you must know last year more than a hundred intact coffins were discovered at the site of sakura what are we likely to learn from those or what kinds of questions will be answered as that investigation proceeds right so that that's work that's ongoing
by my esteemed colleagues at egypt's ministry of antiquities and what's always amazing you know when you find these large corpuses these large groups of coffins um that are are you know buried together is we learn an amazing amount about daily life
you know it seems based on you know a lot of the initial work um that i've seen and i was very lucky one of my last trips before the pandemic started was um going to egypt for meetings with my colleagues and a number of these coffins were on display at the egyptian museum in cairo
so i got to see them and read some of the inscriptions and they're just absolutely stunning but it seems like it was a burial for priests who were living and working around saqqara so they dated to roughly um 3 000 years ago 2 500 years ago sort of this post
new kingdom imperial age into um the ptolemaic period so later later a little bit later in time and we're going to learn about uh religious practices about their relationships i'm sure a lot of the mummies um and coffins will end up getting cat scanned so we'll be able to learn
about um disease you know how old were they when they died how what was their diet like you know were they eating better than the average population he's mostly men in their i don't know 50s 60s were there women are there women that are buried there
are they related to each other so we're able to really get a much better picture about kind of religion and the types of people that would have worked in temples so there's a lot we can get from them what were the functions of grave goods in those worlds they seem wasteful
obviously you're burying valuable wealth right we don't do too much of that why do it at all if you're not a wealthy society so you want to um uh you want to prepare the body and uh the soul for eternity and you want to make sure that you equip um the people being buried with enough
items to kind of get them through the afterlife because for the ancient egyptians death was really the the beginning it was your it was your entree into eternity and so of course you'd need things like a bed and linen and food and jewelry um and you know you
would have been buried with hundreds of little shabties these little little work figures that would have worked for you um in the afterlife so you needed these grave goods to um to essentially allow you to keep living your life after death and in particular if you
were you know a wealthy person from the time you were a young adult you would have begun preparing your burial um you know only the most wealthy most elite could afford very high end tombs you know most people would have been buried in simple simple graves maybe cut into
shallowly into the bedrock or in sand uh but it's interesting so that the archeological site where i work at lisht which dates to about 20 um 3 800 years ago 1800 bc we find a full range of burials everything from the most elite down to probably lower lower middle class
burials and even even the lower middle class individuals you know still would have been married with something so you wanted to um those to prepare you for the afterlife but do we think people back then actually believed that so you could find a lot of textual evidence
that today's burial practices are for the next world but in most societies especially men they're not so religious right they're fairly skeptical they might just think when you die you die and there's a societal puffery surrounding death rituals but what
people actually believe is something different i mean is there a more cynical way to think about grave goods so yes so it's so it for frank the ancient egyptians i mean this is this is what they believed um so for we it's really hard and i teach this in a lot of my my archaeology
classes and talk about this when i give lectures you know we're we're all so biased and we're all in such modern mindsets about religion and even really religious people you sort of roll your eyes sometimes you're like you really because you're not acting like that
um but for the ancient egyptians their religion was the way was their entire worldview it's how they interacted with the world so the wind wasn't the wind it was the god shoe um uh touching them it the nile wasn't the nile it was the god happy um and so in many ways if we think
of think of their religion in some ways as their their science um and how they understood the changes in the world around them i think that's kind of how we can better understand why they did what they did and why they believed what they believed they
believed this stuff and so for them um they genuinely believed that uh that when they died um these things or the spirits within these things would accompany them to the afterlife and and it wasn't just about building a tomb and putting goods in it that that was just one step
you needed to make sure that during your life you married and you had children so that in particular your sons could carry on um rituals they could carry on making offerings to your spirit in the afterlife that was really important so for a lot of these tombs
especially at sites like list we find shrines um so people could come and think of it kind of like a mexican day of the dead uh your family could come and picnic and make offerings so that that was just as important as the grave goods what is the least crazy version of the
atlanta smith i might plausibly believe in i i think that there there's isn't there like an atlantis in the bahamas um that's that's about the least crazy one uh so so what uh atlantis was a myth it was it was invented by plato it was meant to serve as a kind of a lesson
um if you read the text in that way you know he's he's trying to pass on a lesson to his students look at this immoral society um look at all all uh you know look at what could have happened now i think it it was probably loosely based on santorini um you know plato certainly would have
been aware of santorini and what happened with the eruption so i think you could loosely say yeah it's kind of santorini ish um so the site of a criteria you know this great volcanic explosion um that that impacted um the archaeology of not just that that
island um and thera but but the whole region so yeah it's you know people are looking for it but it's it's just i keep telling people you need to stop it doesn't it doesn't really exist it's just a figment of someone's imagination it seems we now know that the
polynesians in south america had contact at least in one direction possibly about a thousand years ago given that fact how far do you think the phoenicians are able to go so yeah so i think you know more and more um uh constantly you know gets being discovered about how far
a field um people traveled and i think you know the phoenicians were extraordinary sailors um and and had amazing uh shipbuilding techniques um but i i think we can frame this in terms of like how far were ancient peoples able to go and we keep finding again using all of
these new tools and technologies and techniques we keep finding archaeological evidence for all of this amazing long-distance trade that goes back to you know 3000 bc so so 5 000 years ago or more but certainly you know all over um all over the mediterranean you know
it's amazing to think that for example in the time of cleopatra there was contact between egypt and india um when we know this because there are archaeological sites along the red sea coast and particularly the site of mary nike where we we know for sure there's
there's archaeological evidence of this long-distance trade so certainly um you know as uh as more and more tools and techniques and technologies keep being applied we're going to find out more about how far people were able to go the phoenicians did not make it all the way
to america that's definitely did not did not happen why say definitely look the pacific is big right the atlantic seems like a hop skip and a jump why couldn't they have made it to mexico who knows who knows but but it's it's there's not been a thing
but you know i think i think for example um you know i've done i've dipped my toe in in the viking world and i certainly think over over time you know we are going to find more evidence um for the vikings um certainly i i think they made it down to new england i don't think that's
too implausible you know they weren't that far away in newfoundland um and we also we have evidence of a viking coin that was founded at a site in maine um did it mean that that the vikings made it to me maine could it have been long-distance trade who knows but
i certainly think they would have explored so yeah so i think the phoenicians you know certainly very well known for for sailing around the mediterranean um but how far they actually got you know that just depends on the archaeological data the chance of significant new copies of
manuscripts being unearthed what kinds of things might we be likely to find in the next 20 years so yeah so kind of getting back to what i said before about you know new new scanning tools and technologies and infrared um uh uh you know being able to read burnt scrolls you
know there have been so many of course uh manuscripts lost over time to things like fire um you know i think a lot about the what was lost at the library of alexandria but also so many manuscripts are polymcest in other words they have these
ancient texts on them and then the the the ancient scribes would have erased them or scraped away the old texts or they would have been faded and they wrote new texts on top of them so there's a lot of papyrus a lot of scrolls that were reused over time and through this
scanning we're able to see new sections of stories or you know maybe maybe stories from the bible um uh or or older versions of stories from the bible um so yeah and also there are massive massive manuscript collections in iraq in syria and afghanistan and egypt
and so many other places that that have never been fully um examined so you know there are hundreds of thousands millions of manuscripts from these places and people are archivists and they go and they study them and they scan them and these these have not been
digitized it's one of i think one of the urgent urgent projects because so many of these uh manuscript collections were burned by entities like isil so yeah i i think still you know alongside the archaeological discoveries we make in the ground which in some cases may
include manuscripts i think one of the great treasure troves unexplored treasure troves of the world are these manuscript archives where who knows who knows what we'll find there what do you think is the greatest archaeological mistake of say the last 100 years something we
touched and should have left alone that is a wonderful question um uh wow no one's ever asked me that before um what is the greatest archaeological mistake um that's a hard question because there have been a lot of mistakes i don't know about the biggest mistake i think
it will be the biggest archaeological mistake i i have my own personal opinion um but but i i i don't speak on behalf of my colleagues for this one um i think when archaeologists go into the field they don't pair conservation alongside excavation in other words
they'll dig and then whatever they've excavated they won't protect or they won't solidify or they won't take the necessary steps to make sure that whatever they've excavated and this is in every case by the way this is this is but in a lot of cases and especially
from 100 years ago and up to maybe 20 25 years ago when this wasn't as much of a priority um these things were left exposed to the elements and so a lot of these amazing discoveries from a long time ago are exposed to the elements and you know you look at archaeological sites like
pompeii um where the um the ministry in in in uh italy you know responsible for its uh conservation they've been chronically underfunded i've heard there are potential connections to mafia lots of corruption a lot of these amazing uh houses are almost falling down
so i i think conservation and protecting sites needs to be funded as much as new discoveries and it's not just italy right this is an issue all over the world as you know when places such as looks are often people who live there they'll build
homes on top of elite tombs what should archaeologists do about that just leave it alone try to move the people out is there a way to deal with the people who are living there that is kind of fair bargaining position given that the government might be on your side rather than theirs
that's that's a really interesting question so on the on the screen behind me right now i don't know if they'll end up being a screenshot of it and i'm happy to share the image so you can post it on your on your website um so this is lesched and you see behind
me you know we're standing on a fourth at almost four thousand year old cemetery but we have the modern cemetery right behind us so archaeological sites are living places uh more often than not it's not like they were you know abandoned thousands of years ago or hundreds of years ago and people
people people are gone um the local communities living on these sites are next to them are essential and so community archaeology is a really really important part of the field of archaeology and i think first and foremost you know when we excavate in the field
we're anthropologists we're cultural anthropologists so you have to speak the local language i speak arabic i'm not completely fluent but i i know enough um you know i'm certainly fluent in egyptian culture all my workforce is egyptian um my core staff it's a
joint mission with the ministry of antiquities so it means that i have an egyptian co-director and you have to have really close working relationships with local villagers because ultimately they're the ones who are the stewards and guardians of these sites
and they've in many cases never had a chance to connect with these places and there's a lot of economic opportunity there so i think we have to tread very carefully um you know a lot in a lot of instances uh the people who are living on our next decides are related to the people who live there
thousands of years ago so you know as inconvenient as it might be that their houses are there um these are human beings and they've lived in these places for a very very long time so how do you deal with these situations sensitively and we're having a lot of
really difficult conversations right now certainly you know in in egypt and luxor and the village um uh that was on top of a lot of the um tombs of the new kingdom the egyptian government basically evicted the folks who are living there a lot of the tombs had been
damaged and now they're conserving the tombs and that's a decision that the ministry of antiquities in the egyptian government made there are a lot of protests um you know i i'm not in a position i feel like to criticize what they did it happened that was a decision they made
and they felt it was best for their own heritage and i think we have to listen very carefully to foreign governments and places where we work but yeah this is a problem all over the world what do we do do you just evict families with kids who in these communities right that's the
other important thing these are communities um and they're not all stealing from these sites they just happen to live there so this is a big question and one that i think we'll be dealing with for the next hundred or more years which do you think is a bigger threat to archaeological
sites economic development or looting economic development um you know i think a lot of people look at looting and they think oh it's looting you're stealing from sites all these sites are threatened well sorry to burst your bubble but looting has been going on
for thousands of years um you know we have we have potsherds from from 5000 years ago in egypt that were worn down from people digging out tombs of the you know earliest wealthy burials people have been stealing from tombs for a very long time this is part of the
human condition so i would say economic development and encroachment it's not particularly sexy at all it bores people people want to hear stories of looting um because encroachment is much more difficult you know if you look at archaeological sites in egypt in peru
and china in india all over the world um you know they're simply um there aren't as many places for people to live and so a big open site um or maybe their village is close by and it's easy to expand the other issue of course is where you bury your dead and a lot of governments
don't have good plans for this so of course they encroach upon these sites um there's unchecked development around the world uh certainly in in places like central asia this is a huge problem um you know with new pipelines being put in with cities expanding
and there there are in so many cases not there's not good documentation of archaeological sites so i'd say encroachment and economic development and why do we need to grow 10 or 20 every year this ties into much bigger questions around globalization and global development but given that
looting protects collectible goods and at least sometimes depends who loots but it puts the goods into the hands of collectors who have a profit incentive to take care of them how should we think about what is the optimum degree of looting because if there's no
looting development might destroy the site right so yeah i mean of course there's never any optimum degree of looting ideally there would be hardly any looting but given the constraints we face right right right right so so you know i i've talked a lot to the villagers that work at
lisht um because many of them were involved uh i mean not just them but the people from the running area um they were involved in looting post-arab spring so so in 2011 and i've learned a lot about who loots and why they loot and when they loot um so you sure you
have to think of archaeological sites in some ways like community piggy banks and it's not like local people are out digging every day robbing the site down to nothing um you know a lot they'll they'll tap it every now and then so someone needs surgery someone needs
to go to school it's kind of like a it's like a gig income and so post arab spring the village would or villagers would organize into collective groups and not just there all over egypt and this is kind of how things work across the middle east
um so they organize collectively they go loot a tomb they'll find whatever they find and then they'll split the proceeds it's a very different kind of looting than someone comes from cairo via dealer in jordan via dealer in dubai via dealer in paris or a dealer in new york and
they've specifically said we want x y and z objects from these types of sites and so someone will come to the village and say i will pay each of you twenty dollars a night to go loot and that's very different they work much faster it's very dangerous
they can loot a tomb in a night and these are people that dig down 40 or 50 feet into a shaft tomb um so again we have to understand the kinds of looting that that that are happening in different places in the world and people loot because they need money right and it's not a black or
white issue villagers aren't getting rich off of this stuff it's the collectors it's the middlemen um it's it's much bigger questions around shutting down trade and understanding networks and it's very similar to the international wildlife trade or or
gun running or money laundering it's all it's all connected now i once did field work on other issues in a small mexican village very rural and they had a small aztec pyramid in the center of town and one year they decided to knock that down and just put up a modern
small municipal building they seemed really quite unsentimental about that decision if anything there was a slight fear that if they kept the pyramid around it might attract interest from the outside world which they didn't want viewing the outside mexican police
and governance as forces that would take resources from them should i have tried to talk them out of that decision or should i have just been you know gung-ho yeah sorry you all you people but you know this is the best thing for you to do so this is really difficult and you know
it's these are issues that we contend with all the time in in the field whether we're anthropologists or political scientists or archaeologists or what any any time we're doing work in a foreign area to what extent do you intervene when you see things that are problematic going on
and you know for example with all the work i've done with mapping looting around archaeological sites in egypt i've shared all that information with the government of egypt and at that point i'm done i can advocate i can try to be an ally i can try to
talk to them about best practices or things to be thinking about but ultimately it's the governments in these places that are responsible for protecting the sites or not and there is as you know massive corruption around the world uh and if a wealthy local landowner
wanted that plaza or that that pyramid to build whatever and they pay a bribe of a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars or whatever it is that thing's going um so we have to look at the incentives around who's who's paying for destruction to happen and the value of that thing in the
community and and kind of flip it around there have been a lot of instances where archaeological sites all over the world have been threatened or cultural sites and the local communities have risen up and protested and protected the site so i think this is
this is more about empowering local communities and getting them to understand that they're the stewards they're the guardians um because in so many countries there aren't enough archaeologists right you know the arts and culture are chronically underfunded
all around the world they're only a fraction of a percent of most countries budgets um and so people feel disconnected from their history so how do we change the global dialogue around the value of archaeology and history and empower communities to want to protect their histories and
show them how they're connected to it how should archaeologists think about the political uses that their work is put by especially foreign autocratic governments so as you know foreign autocratic governments use the past to legitimize their presence
now because the past typically was not democratic there's some grand and glorious history what is dug up from the past is used to justify the present which can be quite oppressive and if one is an archaeologist helping to dig up that past should you seek in any way to control
either the goods or the message of how those outputs are then translated into arguments about the current day it's a great question i i joke with people you know who say would you ever be interested in going into politics and i say all the skeletons in my closet are real
uh no thank you and yet archaeology is inherently political by its very nature right any time you contend with the past interpreting how that past impacts who we are today i i'll just get just just a very recent example from the january sixth insurrection you
know we saw people dressed up as viking-esque um indigenous um coast players um symbols from um from the vikings and from the classical world have been co-opted by far-right extremist groups for years and years and years so we see it here in our own country
certainly around the world concepts of ownership who who came to a place first who has the right to be living in this place and governments will use discoveries from archaeological sites um to to prove that oh we're older we're better or this particular religious group was here first
hence we have a right to do these commit these atrocities or erase these peoples we see this everywhere we see this all over the world and so oftentimes archaeologists will find themselves caught up in political controversies they're like hey i i'm
just digging up the site why are you bothering me uh you look look look at what's happened in in england uh in the last few days the government's come out with a very strong statement against academics and museums saying you know you can't um erase our our glorious past
and everyone is saying wait a minute um you know our past is problematic um we teach about who we are um because we we were founded on this colonialist on these colonialist ideals you can't just erase what happened and yet we're having these dialogues so yeah this is this is a huge issue
everywhere we work um and we have to be careful because you know i i and my colleagues only are able to work in these places because of the permits and permissions from these governments and while i may have very strong feelings about things that are happening
in particular places if i speak out against them or take a side then that government will say see you later and so we're always balancing good versus harm what is the good that i can do by continuing my work in this place to be an advocate for heritage and to educate
and empower all these local communities and all these people because they're the ones ultimately that are going to be the stewards and and i lose my power to do that if i say something um so empowering in itself is uh and training and educating and doing the outreach
that's the radical work of what we do ultimately it's up to the people who live in these places but yeah it's this is a real thorny issue and one we're going to be hearing about again and again of course with the rise of nationalism around the world do you have any suggestions for how we
might improve intellectual intellectual property rights or just property rights that govern excavations so you might be excavating on private property it could be corporate property it could be controlled by the state and who has the rights to what say you
discover natural resources while you're doing a satellite search there could be a national security issue are we getting that right currently or is there some way we could improve the allocation of those rights so um i mean i've learned a lot the hard way you know with all of my work i think
i've worked in 14 or 15 countries to date i've made a lot of mistakes so with my colleagues you know we're just it's always a learning process and and it's always a process of negotiation so first of all when you ask for permission to work in a place you're
negotiating okay i'd like to do things a through g and the government may turn around and go okay you can do a through d and if you do them well you can do enf next year and don't even ever think about g um or maybe in the future so so there's
a negotiation to even do the work and process the fines or dig or survey your map or whatever you're proposing to do um and and you're also negotiating with your colleagues over rights to publish um you certainly have the right to publish your your research but ultimately who
who owns that data so just as an example in egypt it is illegal for a foreigner working in egypt to make a major announcement about their discovery the egyptian government is the one that has to make that announcement now obviously you can show pictures from your sites
you you um you know uh that's that's fine you can chew on going ongoing pictures of work but if you do make a major discovery of a tomb the government of egypt has that right because of course they do that's this is their heritage and and the rules are similar in other
places so we have to respect the laws otherwise we won't get the ability to to work yeah so but sometimes you do end up making an amazing discovery randomly years and years ago um when we were doing survey work in sinai we ended up finding a dinosaur i always
get asked oh archaeologists don't you do dinosaurs i'm like no but actually yes kind of um so that was wild right who who finds a dinosaur was actually a mesosaur i think my eight-year-old son could tell you much more about the mesosaur than i could i don't really do
dinosaurs apologies to my colleagues who are listening right now who do uh but of course we turned over that information immediately to the local university and we let the government know you do make unexpected fines and just have to follow the rules in that
country but yeah there's a lot of issues now around intellectual property at universities who owns this data how is it being used is it being monetized and again these are these are complicated questions there's now a segment in most of these chats called overrated versus underrated
i'll toss out some notions and names and you tell me if you think they're overrated or underrated okay okay herodotus overrated why um he he liked to make up a lot of stories and he to me he's like you're he's like your slightly drunk uncle um you know
at thanksgiving and you're like oh god uncle herodotus again like you can believe a grain of what he says and you have to like how much is the truth really so yeah i rely on the archaeology not as much with herodotus with apologies to my classical colleagues
egyptian cuisine overrated or underrated underrated it's amazing it's like it they use all of these extraordinary fresh local ingredients the most they have the most incredible tomatoes in the whole world they taste of magic and sunshine um uh eggplant um potatoes onions garlic
uh buffalo uh lamb beef it's just uh the stews and the most amazing rose water infused pastries i am getting hangry right now thinking about it the cook's there that especially we get our food at lish made by these amazing local women and my my dig team complains because
they always put on weight the food is so good so totally underrated anyone listening go to your local egyptian restaurant you will you will thank me don't forget the seafood in alexandria by the way of course amazing amazing harrison ford overrated or underrated
uh i am super biased i i think harrison gets the exact amount of of of of credit he deserves so i guess kind of neither um i had the chance to meet him uh a few years ago at a ted conference and he was an absolutely delightful delightful human being and very kind and very generous
so i don't want to say overrated or underrated i think he's he's very much appreciated what's your favorite harrison ford movie i first indiana jones is as problematic as i know it is i i know i know i know but i can't i can't help it i mean that's you know like so many archaeologists who
are in their 40s and 50s that's one of the things that inspired me to go into the field so so yeah definitely the first indie movie the recent british movie the dig about archaeologists right overrated or underrated it's amazing it's absolutely amazing i
know some of my colleagues have critiqued it but i it it was so beautifully done i mean i'm a huge ralph fan i think he's gorgeous um but the sort of gruff every man um who you know this is his his obsession it's what he's good at um the care with which he digs the
passion um even the scene at the end where they're all backfilling like they got it right they really got it right it shows kind of what a dig is like and also all the drama that happens around an excavation season not necessarily you know in the backdrop of war that's
how we always dig but certainly the relationships the complexities how people are interacting with each other the pressures from local authorities i i think it's one of the best archaeology movies that's ever been done so if you haven't seen it yet definitely
go go see it it's done pretty well rating wise but i think underrated in the sense that like not enough people know about it yet who is your favorite bluegrass guitarist oh boy oh man for me it's clarence white but you know i've spent too much time with paul romer
oh gosh i have so many um i mean so so i boy i i don't want to name one i mean so i'm a huge fan of um uh even though he plays banjo not not lewis guitar but i love bayla fleck and abigail washburn yes full disclosure they're they're friends of mine so
um but i think they're brilliant brilliant i think they're playing some of the best bluegrass in the world today i love their love their joint albums and i've had a chance to hear them up close playing and it's magic i've seen them twice loved it would second their recommendation
how is it that you came to work on eastern equine encephalitis oh yeah that's pretty of all the things i've done that may be one of the most random although not the most random so my university uh university of alabama at birmingham um is pretty well known for its medical
school so we've got you know top um 20 25 schools of public health medicine nursing and so one of the things that the university encourages although it certainly does doesn't force they encourage their faculty on my side of campus which is the college of arts and sciences
to collaborate with people working in the medical school and so i can't remember i feel like it was a long time ago 12 years ago or so there were some people who moved to uab from another institution and they were specialists in the application of satellite imagery
um to mapping ancient diseases and so i started working with them started working with them on projects and also in my at the time i was running a remote sensing lab and i was mentoring um and working with a number of phd and master's students from the school of public health
some from the school of dentistry some from biology and they were interested in looking at kind of environmental aspects impacting modern diseases so i collaborated with this team uh and looked at um kind of vegetation and how landscape change over time and modern
modern um to your point earlier about economic development on on how changes to landscapes from growing populations impacted the growth of diseases and things like zoonoses so you know whether mosquitoes or other animals that can pass on diseases which of course we're seeing
today with with the pandemic so yeah so that's how i ended up on a couple of public health uh publications because of my remote sensing work and obviously you can't zoom in from hundreds of miles in space and see mosquitoes that is ridiculous so who knows maybe someday we will be
but you can see things like changes in water temperature turbidity uh vegetation uh changes to um chemicals and fertilizers that are being used on those uh water sources and you can study rates of things like malaria or other diseases and compare it
to changes you're seeing in the landscape let's say you're you're walking around cairo you have a day off and i know you probably never do but you're playing tourists for a day you're not at an archaeological site but how is it you think you take in cairo differently
compared to another educated person but who doesn't do archaeology so i i i'm i've worked in egypt now for more than 20 years to me it's um it's another home you know it's our second home it's where i met my my husband he's not not egyptian he's canadian and british
um but we have a lot of very close egyptian friends there are our family um so if i had a day off in cairo and i wasn't you know taking students around archaeological sites or or not going to museums um i so if i had a day off generally you know um depends on where i am i guess if a
thyroid luxor or cairo would be a little bit different so i love bird watching i'm a bird nerd um so i love going off into um uh into uh into fetching more vegetated areas with my binoculars um certainly going going on the nile um it's much easier in luxor and aswan
they're obviously far less people and i'll spend certainly in the early in the morning i'll go bird watching it's very peaceful you see extraordinary types of birds um i'll spend i love spending time in cafes with my egyptian friends um because you get to see the world go
by there are a couple of cafe really really famous is in the hanahalili market which is the big tourist market that everyone goes to to buy their touristy schlock but there are a couple of cafes and you go and you sit and you drink your mint tea you smoke a shisha i don't smoke except
in egypt i love their um i love the sort of hubble bubbly pipes my husband and mother are horrified that i do this in egypt but i can't help it it's it's one one of my little enjoyments and you just watch the world go by you see every kind of person
you can imagine people come up and try to sell you things you see crazy things you have great conversation with your friends maybe you catch a game of backgammon you gossip that's incredibly pleasant as i mentioned before i love egyptian food they're some of my favorite
restaurants and different parts of cairo so i'll go with my friends and we'll have an incredible meal and the lovely thing about egyptian food is that it's communal so you'll order maybe 15 or 20 different dishes you'll all have bites you're all trying things
you're putting things together um it's a lot of fun it's kind of like it's it's like tapas um i love also um uh music you alluded to bluegrass guitar i i play i play guitar i love i love egyptian music so there's this wonderful instrument called an ood um sort of like a short squat squat
stringed instrument um and so i love going to concerts um if there are concerts on at diverse locations you know egyptian singers are wonderful um uh and also i love i love sailing on the nile um so we'll sometimes take a faluka or a boat um you know their dinner boats uh
especially in places like luxor at night it's beautiful um so yeah i do a lot of non-touristy things also there are amazing museums in cairo that are not archaeological you know they're wonderful um uh galleries that are just display work by wonderful egyptian
modern artists and i love i love going to those as well let's say i have the ability to take a month off work and enough money to fly anywhere you send me and i just want to see archaeological sites purely subjective from you what tour do you design for me where do
you send me oh boy okay egypt aside right we know that's your first love but so so a month um you can probably you know depending on travel and you want to be able to take places in so probably a couple days at every place so maybe you have time to see kind of 10
10 things um you know you want to hit the highlights versus say a themed tour um and i'm very biased having been to very very many places in the world um so i would say certainly going to going to takal in guatemala that's unbelievable and of course everyone who's seen
the third star wars movie you see the little temple sticking out from around the rainforest and it's amazing because you have this extraordinary maya site and then you're surrounded by beautiful rainforest so go there first then fly down to peru you've got to see
machu picchu i had the chance to see it a couple years ago for the first time um and i wasn't prepared you know i've seen pictures i'd i my colleagues had told me about it but the the breathtaking awe and majesty of where it's situated and just the fact that the world
drops away around it and it's surrounded by mountains and there's this beautiful little town that the the inca built on top of a mountain it's like mind-blowing um so easter island um i would say um stonehenge at solstice just because it's it's worth seeing all the monks and
everyone dressed up and the and the festivities and you get a sense of how that place would have been honored in antiquity and it's it's beautiful so definitely stonehenge i would say um you've got to hit pompei and herculaneum just because they're so well preserved
and it's like you are walking around uh an old european um village uh or or town and you just get the sense of how people lived um i would say um uh and this is gonna jump around a bit geographically as i try to um try to pick the top top top places uh
i would say encore wat um it's it's the only place i visited in the world aside from the vatican where i got so overwhelmed i had to sit and like take a nap in situ because my eyes hurt um there was too much for me to take in so at angkor it's not just one temple it's
dozens and dozens of temples and the the khmer um they they carved every square inch of their temples with images of gods and goddesses and religious scenes and and you don't know where to look just ev everywhere you look is a perfect picture so definitely
encore and obviously the food and the culture as as well um the terracotta warriors of xi'an i cried when i visited them for the first time um it's so overwhelming to be there i i went i was there with a group of archaeologists and uh um and we all just stood and it just
there's an energy to this place i'm a scientist i don't believe in crystal goddesses and energy fields and all that stuff but there was such a presence to that place that i've haven't felt anywhere else in the world um and and it just we just stood for a half hour unable to speak
because it was so overwhelming um i've never been to easter island although i that's next that's on the next um as soon as the pandemic is over we're going to easter island and and my colleagues that work there and we're trading out a trip for egypt to a trip to eastern ireland
so definitely hit easter island uh as well it's beautiful and amazing so i think that would probably take care of your month that would take care of the month now you're a pioneer with technology let me mention just a few technologies tell me briefly what they are good for
in archaeology google earth so google earth is wonderful because they're it's a free resource we like free in archaeology there isn't as much grant money now um and you can zoom in you know at virtually any archaeological site in the world at for a very high resolution
image so a resolution of two feet fifty centimeters or or or lower and you can see so much right you can scan back and forth you can look at different times if your features will pop out there have been thousands of discoveries made using google earth alone
um so it's a great starting point for looking at archaeological sites and the landscape surrounding them iirc ground penetrating radar so in places like egypt you know in so many desert locations of course you walk over an archaeological site and it's a
little bumpy but you don't know what's going on beneath it so we use things like ground penetrating radar to get these multiple levels of feedback and readings and we're able to reconstruct with a high degree of certainty where there are buried walls and other
features so that we can far better target our excavation work and in essence in some cases get a map of almost everything that's there lidar so that stands for light detection and ranging in places like cambodia you know uh the khmer uh the maya or central america south
america of course we can't see through trees and what this does the ladder does is it allows you to fly whether it's an unmatched unmanned aerial vehicle helicopter or airplane um it allows you to send down it's a sensor system that allows you to send down thousands millions
of pulse beams of lasers that where you can remove the overlaying vegetation and you're left with what's called a bare earth model or a digital elevation model and you can in effect see everything that's there so my colleagues have used this to find
tens of thousands of new features and sites in central america and cambodia and many many other places in the world it's the only way to see through trees do you worry that we're now finding new sites more rapidly than we can protect them 100 um you know there
there aren't very many countries in the world that have a good sense of their own archaeological inventories you know england is one israel is one um other countries have inventories but you look at it and you're like wait a minute you're a huge country you only have
2 000 sites in your inventory that's not right um because the people who live there or work there don't have training and remote sensing they don't have training in in how to um manage all of these sites and features and of course we worry that this information is going to get out
um and going to get in the hands of people who could potentially misuse it so 100 yeah we we definitely are finding things way faster than we can protect them and that's why archaeologists will often sit on their data because they don't know what to do with it
and who should own that data it's another thorny issue who owns archaeological data and what happens when you turn over all your data to a government in good faith but they don't even have the computers to store it or they do but they have computers from 15 years
ago and someone in the office steals the data and puts it online who's responsible then is it you for giving them the data or for them um because they didn't have the right protection places in place so you know governments certainly certainly egypt at the end of
every season we have to turn in a fully detailed report you know a database of what we found of course that's how archaeology works there and our colleagues at the ministry of antiquities are very well trained um and are are good at kind of taking in this information but it's
not necessarily that way everywhere in the world um so who has the right to publish who has the right to be first author um you know one of the things i worked really hard on in archaeology from space um is you know a third of the archaeologists that are mentioned in the
book are indigenous archaeologists um and almost half are women you know i could have very easily cited the the archaeological remote sensing work of of white european or american or canadian men um i was very intentional in how i did that and and so
the idea that you know we can't make space for individuals who are brilliant young archaeologists in our publications you know it's something my colleagues and i are working on uh because they may not have the resources um or the capabilities you know to pay a journal fee
um and we we need to be doing that for them so yeah this this goes beyond kind of who owns the data and it's more who is who are the people that get to be the storytellers who gets to be first author what happened to malaysian air flight 370. um i i mean i think it it went down
unfortunately um a really sad story um you know i know everyone looked for it i think they found some pieces of aircraft they thought might come from it i think maybe someday they'll they'll find it i think it's in a deep part of the ocean that they really have trouble kind of
accessing but unfortunately i think it it went down um you know my colleagues who do work in in aviation certainly have a lot of diverse series there was unfortunately some kind of malfunction and it just it just went down and it happened sometimes it's awful
how much math and stats do you need to know to do to do your work um a lot more and a lot less a lot more and a lot less than i thought um um trigonometry is really really really important for archaeology so it's important for something incredible yes really important for some
things calculus no no no no no not for not for the work that i do um and also a lot of the computer programs i use it's like plug and play so you put in your numbers and it spits out all the stats so i don't need to calculate them but i do need to understand what they mean
so i think this is really important i think every archaeologist should take stats classes to understand um median mode regression what does it all mean you know we've all seen the funny memes online of the charts that look fancy but don't mean anything and anyone can
interpret anything you know just because just because there's data and there's numbers doesn't mean that there's a conclusion sometimes there's data and there's there's data that doesn't it's a mess so i think it's important to know stats really really well for the work that i
do and my colleagues do uh and you know for all the measuring that we do for all of the angles for measuring when we're um you know measuring in points yes of course there's all these wonderful gps's where you just ping it in the ground and it measures it
for you but we do a lot of things the old school and sometimes your batteries run out so you have to know uh geometry and trigonometry to be able to calculate things here's something that struck me studying your work and give me your reaction it seems to me your job
is almost becoming impossible so you have to know stats you have to know trigonometry you have to know geometry in your case you need to know egyptian arabic possibly some dialect possibly some classical arabic maybe some other languages you have to know archaeology right you
have to know history you must have to know all kinds of physical techniques for unearthing materials without damaging them too much you need to know about data storage and i could go on and on and on but hasn't your job evolved to the point where you're almost
you need to know about technologies right for finding data from space we talked about those before that's also not easy isn't your job evolving to the point where literally no human can do it and you're like the last in the line i mean you know i i i am i am i guess
jack of all trades master of a few but that's not true either because i have to i have to know i have to know the remote sensing programs i have to know geographic information systems i have to be up to date on um you know international cultural heritage laws but i think
i i i'm not special by a long shot every archaeologist is a specialist you know it you know this archaeologist is a specialist in the pottery of this period of time or uh or or does dna or uh excavates human remains they're bioarchaeologists or they do computation
so we all are specialists in a particular thing but that's really broad i mean my my unsexy more academic term is landscape archaeologist so i'm interested in ancient human environment interaction which encompasses a lot of different fields and subfields you know i i've taken many courses in
geology uh all of us who study egyptology are also um you know we we do a lot of training in our history because of course the iconography and the art and the objects that we're finding so it takes a lot but i would say most of the knowledge i've gotten
is is experiential so it's from being in the field i've visited you know hundreds of museums um i've spent countless hours in in museum collections learning touching objects um so yeah it's it's a lot but it's also the field of archaeology i guess that's why so many people
really love it because you get to touch on so many different areas and i would never for example consider myself a specialist in bioarchaeology i i know a tibia i know what a you know uh when when i find pitting on a skull i know what that could potentially mean
but also you know i'm in a position now where i'm a dig director so that means i'm in charge of a large group of humans um most of whom are far smarter more capable than i am in whatever they're doing so they're specialists in pottery and bone in rocks you know a project geologist
and conservation in art we have project artists uh we have specialists in excavation and of course there's my egyptian team very talented egyptian team they're excavating so i'm also i'm probably a lot more of a manager now than i ever expected to be um
and fundraiser perhaps right yeah i have to raise money right we're always hustling whether it's government grants or raising money from private individuals um so yeah so uh yeah i think it's more it's more managing it's having enough of an understanding of all of these different subfields
to know when someone's really good at them so whether i can look at a paper and go okay that person is really good at this or go the papers were sighting or they're really talented i would love to invite them to join our project because it would be
wonderful to collaborate with them so yeah so so i think again every archaeologist who directs a project is is the same as as me i just happen to specialize in a form of technology and by the way i feel like i'm drowning constantly i can't keep up there's so many new satellites and
sensors and tools and techniques and new programs um i get overwhelmed and i you know i'm a mom i i i'm a busy professor i have my students so yeah i'm constantly behind but again my colleagues would tell you the same thing i think you said in one of your youtube
talks there are only a few hundred space archaeologists what's the binding constraint like what stops there from being more um i think the the training um so you know i've i trained for years and years i took a lot of remote sensing classes computational classes i don't program i
can't code that's my that's my line i could have gone down that road and i just um i i it was too much it was way way way too much for me to do that excuse me um so i would say um it just takes a long time to learn to get really good at it you
know but the students i've mentored at my university um you know they do an introductory course and then they do an advanced applications course so after about a year of taking these courses and really intensely working um in a lab environment then and only then the students start
feeling comfortable doing project work on their own so it takes a year of intensive training but this is one of the reasons i started my not-for-profit and our citizen archaeology platform uh because you know everyone is born an explorer uh everyone is good at using
their eyes um or or understanding the environment around them and making observational um or doing observation and so this online citizen archaeology platform gives the world a chance to look at satellite images and help find sites and ultimately help scale the work that
we're doing so i want to turn as many people around the world into space archaeologists you know it's fun they can do it they're really good at it um and you know we need more we need more eyes mapping these sites what's a typical email you get from somebody who has found something or
maybe thinks they found something and haven't what do they write you um so it's interesting i get you know probably a couple emails a week from people i would say it depends on where they're from that is a good kind of barometer of the believability of
what they find so i would say that 100 of the emails i get from people in scandinavia whether it's denmark norway or sweden in particular norway people in norway are really good at finding potential viking ships in their in their fields it's wild and they're always very polite
and respectful and um i'm delighted to get emails like that i'm delighted to get emails from people anyway it's always fun to see what people find um so i i've gotten a lot of really interesting um findings from people in places like italy um you know there's so many villas of
different periods of time that people find in fields or elsewhere um i get a lot of emails from um let's just say interesting individuals who are from america's heartland who spend a lot of time looking for um things of a biblical nature and 100 of the time
they send me snapshots of rocks here's this amazing ship here here's here's um uh here is the lost city of whatever uh in israel or wherever and like you you found some rocks good job found some rocks i don't engage with them because it's not always smart to do it um but every now
and then every now and then i'll get an email from someone who said hey i think i found something i'm like you actually did find something i don't have time to engage with you because my students come first but yeah you found something so yeah i'd say half the time
it's interesting and half the time um it's just part of the job so yeah last two questions first who was it that first recognized your talent in these areas um wow that's a great question um i mean i think um i've always been good at finding things um i
i don't know if it's because i'm just good at pattern recognition but even when i was five six seven years old i could go to a whole patch of four-leaf of of clover and reach in and find the four-leaf clover i just i could from a young age um and so i think my
parents recognized that i was good at pattern recognition i mean we all everyone has diverse talents um and so i always loved puzzles and games they always encouraged me they always got bought me for my birthday and for holidays and you know fun magazines
where i could test or or try out this pattern recognition um uh when i started taking remote sensing classes you know i got good at finding things it's part practice and part being good pattern recognition uh but but also you know there's enormous luck
right you know i got very fortunate um where i went to grad school and obviously in landing an academic position there's enormous privilege um in who i am and what i do and i recognize that you know i i was able to get a scholarship to go to grad school i didn't have an enormous amount of
loans from college um so i think we have to acknowledge all those things as well given the moment in time that that we're in um but you know a lot of perseverance for a long time um when i first started out i was known as quote unquote that satellite girl
which is so problematic on so many levels um and so i persevered um so many of us have had issues with me too um so yeah it's just it's a lot of dogged determination um versus one person recognizing me and over time too um you know if you had told me when i started off that
that i would be here now i wouldn't have believed you um so i'm very very grateful i'm very very grateful for the position that i have and for the platform that i have last question now that you are indeed truly famous what will you do next uh infamous probably at this particular
moment um uh so you know i i especially in the last couple years um you know have been reflecting a lot on on my power and privilege within the field of academia and it's very um it can be overwhelming at times but also i feel like i have an enormous responsibility because
um not very many people in archaeology in academia generally speaking get to move in the circles i get to move in so i'm in a position now where i want to spend the rest of my career giving back and empowering people um it's why i'm so passionate about the
the not-for-profit i run global explorer you know i want to use the tools and technologies that my team at global explorer and i have developed and use them to empower foreign governments to um to create platforms and to allow people in those countries to help map and protect those
archaeological sites so right now our next big project for uh global explorer is building a new version of our global explorer platform we're going to have a machine learning component that will allow us to go much faster and we have a big official partnership
with um the ministry of culture in in india and the government of india and we're built rebuilding this platform we're going to be um launching it later this year so everyone stay stay tuned um and it will allow millions of people from around the world to help map
and protect archaeological sites so that's that's what i want to do you know i spend a lot of time mentoring uh junior colleagues in archaeology and in the social sciences and kind of i'm also giving a lot more advice to cultural heritage bodies
um to the us state department with a lot of their heritage work i'm working on some really interesting documentaries there's some potential entertainment opportunities um so i just i just want to use my voice to be an advocate for the past and to empower as many people as possible um to
to to be new voices you know i get tired i'm tired of hearing my own voice it's time for other people to to be voices and there's so many brilliant young academics uh indigenous archaeologists and specialists and i want to use my platform to celebrate them and honor them and
make sure that they they're the ones whose voices get heard now it's it's you know i'm happy to take a back seat and and to let let them speak instead of me so it's it's their turn sarah park thank you very much and again here is sarah's book archaeology from space thank you so much