Review of Sarah Parcak, Archeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past (Henry Holt and Co., 2019)
Parcak is at the leading edge of an important advance in modern archaeology: using satellite images to discover ancient settlements. Satellites from space can show outlines and patterns in vegetation left by ancient structures that cannot be seen from the ground, or are in previously unreachable places. Satellites are also not limited to the visible spectrum. Radar and lidar can find settlements that have been buried underground for thousands of years. Not only does this show teams the best places to dig, but the macro-level findings can give information about trading routes, settlement patterns, and how people adapted to climate changes, wars, and natural disasters.
Parcak explains how space archaeology works, how the techniques developed, and takes the reader on a tour from Central America to the Middle East to Viking Age settlements. Parcak is an Egyptologist by trade, and spends the most time there. While satellite imagery is not a substitute for digging, it is a fantastic complement that saves untold time and money, and has already led to major discoveries.
Satellite data can also be used to detect looting of ancient sites, and Parcak tells of one case by a New York collector who arranged to have a sarcophagus chopped in half and mailed to him in the U.S. via mail. Satellite data helped to find where the sarcophagus was looted from, determine its authenticity, and track down the culprits, including the collector, who thought his secret was safe.
Publicly available satellite data has another unexpected benefit: crowdsourcing. Parcak and her colleagues put together a website, Global Xplorer, where anyone can look at satellite photos to help discover sites and earn game-style rewards like badges to reward their contributions. Global XPlorer was on hiatus though, when I checked in January 2024.
This 2019 book was already destined to have a short shelf life because the technology and the findings are advancing so rapidly. Towards the end the book, Parcak shortens it even further by expounding on her political ideology, which unlike archaeology is part of a very narrow time and place. The typical reader who picks up a space archaeology book is interested in space archaeology, not the fact that the author views digging as “rebellion, against capitalism, the patriarchy, you name it.”
The reader who skips these self-indulgent passages skips nothing, though they should note the several places in the book where Parcak is thankful for free or low-cost data from Google Earth, which is tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than government data despite Google’s corporate greed.
Parcak also errs when she laments that humanity no longer has a population of only hundreds of millions, or abundant farmland to feed itself. If she had compared daily calories per person in any pre-1800 civilization to today, she might have a different opinion. Each acre of farmland today feeds multiples more people than it did in ancient times, thanks in part to the extensive division of labor that a population of billions makes possible. Moreover, today’s food abundance happens with far less back-breaking labor that traps farmers in subsistence and denies them the opportunities, education, and human rights that she and I both value.
Inertia Wins! 