Sarah Helen Parcak (born 1978) is an American archaeologist and Egyptologist, who has used satellite imagery to identify potential archaeological sites in Egypt, Rome, and elsewhere in the former Roman Empire. She is a professor of Anthropology and director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In partnership with her husband, Greg Mumford, she directs survey and excavation projects in the Faiyum, and Egypt's East Delta.
Parcak was born in Bangor, Maine, and received her bachelor's degree in Egyptology and Archaeological Studies from Yale University in 2001, and her PhD from the University of Cambridge. She is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB); prior to that she was a teacher of Egyptian art and history at the University of Wales, Swansea.
During her undergraduate studies at Yale University, Parcak participated in her first of many digs in Egypt as well as a remote sensing course.
From 2003 to 2004, Parcak used satellite images and surface surveys to detect potential sites of archaeological interest, some dating back to 3000 BC. Parcak's work consisted of detecting minute differences in topography, geology and plant life to explore sites from a variety of cultures. Satellites capable of detecting infrared wavelengths are sometimes able to distinguish differences in plant's chlorophyll, which can sometimes distinguish plants that grow over very shallow buried structures.
In partnership with her husband, Dr. Greg Mumford, she directs Survey and Excavation Projects in the Fayoum and Egypt's East Delta. They used satellite imagery to look for water sources and archaeological sites. According to Parcak, this approach might reduce time and cost for determining archaeological sites compared to surface detection.
In 2007, she founded the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Although Sarah Parcak has been widely publicized for using satellite imagery in archaeology, several of the most prominent claims have been disputed, remained unverified or were later shown to be more limited than media coverage suggested. Her best-supported contributions appear to involve the use of remote sensing for site detection, landscape mapping, and archaeological targeting, rather than the confirmation of large numbers of spectacular âÂÂlostâ sites or monuments.
One of the documented examples concerned the mapping and excavation of a cemetery at el-Lisht, a well-known Middle Kingdom site in Egypt. Reports described Parcak and collaborators as documenting tombs there, many of which had not previously been recorded in detail by Egyptologists. This work is best characterized as the identification and field documentation of a large previously under-recorded funerary landscape within a known archaeological site, rather than the discovery of a âÂÂlost cityâÂÂ.
A well-supported case is identification of a large previously undocumented monumental feature at Petra. In this case, the contribution was not the discovery of Petra itself, which had long been known and extensively studied, but the use of satellite and aerial imagery to identify a specific architectural feature within the site.
Several of Parcak's most widely publicized claims were presented in popular media more strongly than the evidence appears to support. In 2011, media reports and a BBC documentary stated that satellite imagery had identified âÂÂ17 buried pyramids, more than 1,000 tombs and 3,100 settlements, including the city of Tanisâ in Egypt. However, later reporting described these more cautiously as potential buried features and excavation was explicitly noted as necessary to confirm them. No peer-reviewed publication appears to have validated or verified these claims. Parcak has cited the pyramid complex of Pepi II at Saqqara as proof that buried pyramids are detectable by satellite imagery. Pepi IIâÂÂs pyramid complex, however, was already a known and exposed (not buried) pyramid and forms part of the long-documented pyramid field. Therefore, it is not discovery of an unknown pyramid.
Media coverage implied that Parcak âÂÂfoundâ or âÂÂdiscoveredâ Tanis, but Tanis has been extensively excavated since 1836. The more accurate characterization is that satellite imagery was used to map its urban extent within an already known archaeological site, rather than to discover the city itself.
Parcak identified Point Rosee in Newfoundland Canada as a possible Norse or Viking settlement. However, subsequent field investigation found no evidence of a Norse site there. The case is often cited as an example of how a remotely sensed landscape anomaly may generate a hypothesis that is later rejected through excavation and field verification.
Parcak published a study on archaeological site damage and looting in Egypt based on satellite imagery, arguing that looting and related disturbance increased significantly between 2002 and 2013 during the Egyptian revolution. That article was subsequently challenged in the same journal by other researchers, who argued that aspects of its framing and categorization of damage were potentially misleading or overstated.
Researchers argue that, while Parcak's work identifies important trends, conclusions regarding the scale of claims, such as the 17 buried pyramids, were presented more assuredly in media than evidence supports. Taken together, Parcak's record is generally viewed as greater in the popularization of satellite remote sensing as a survey tool than in the confirmation of the lost cities or buried monument discoveries with which she has often been associated in documentaries and popular media.
Other archaeologists noted that remote sensing techniques are useful for identifying potential archaeological anomalies, but that many such anomalies later prove to be natural geological features or modern disturbances when investigated on the ground as was the case at Point Rosee .
Remote sensing experts raised questions regarding the detectability of buried pyramids using thermal infrared satellite imagery. Satellite thermal sensors measure only the surface or "skin" radiance and emissive signals from buried structures attenuate rapidly with depth due to the thermal and physical properties of soils, especially in the Nile Valley which is very saline and waterlogged.
According to conductive heat transfer laws, temperature variations in soil caused by buried structures decreases exponentially with depth, limiting the ability of surface-based thermal measurements to detect buried objects to a few cm. Therefore, any pyramid buried more than a meter below the surface would be undetectable regardless of its temperature. In addition, moisture from mud-brick pyramids is unlikely to propagate to the surface through several meters of sand and silt. Experts have hypothesized that what were identified by Parcak as potential pyramids are more likely to be some other near-surface feature such as scars caused by agricultural equipment.
In 2015, she won the $1 million TED Prize for 2016.
In 2016, she was the recipient of Smithsonian magazine's American Ingenuity Award in the History category. The same year, using satellite images Parcak claimed to have potentially found the second-known Viking site in North America located at Point Rosee in Newfoundland. Upon subsequent ground investigation, the excavation found no evidence of a Viking site or anything of archeological significance.
In 2020, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 2020 Fellowship.
In May 2012, she was the subject of a half-hour program on CNN's The Next List which profiles innovators "who are setting trends and making strides in various fields."
She was the focus of "Rome's Lost Empire", a TV documentary by Dan Snow, first shown on BBC One on 9 December 2012. She identified possible sites in Romania, Nabataea, Tunisia, and Italy, including the arena at Portus, the lighthouse and a canal to Rome beside the river Tiber.
A BBC co-production with PBS, NOVA/WGBH Boston and French Television, Vikings Unearthed (first broadcast April 4, 2016) documented her use of satellite imagery to detect possible remains of a Norse / Viking presence at Point Rosee, Newfoundland. In 2015, Parcak stated that remains were likely a "turf wall and roasted bog" iron ore; however, an excavation conducted in 2016 proved that she was wrong and that the "turf wall and accumulation of bog iron ore" were actually the results of natural processes.
Sarah Parcak used the TED Prize money for a crowdsourced quest. satellite imagery was used to identify archaeological sites in parts of Peru for a crowdsourcing project called GlobalXplorer.. Of the nearly 20,000 sites identified by volunteers, approximately 300 turn out to be of potential interest. Most of these were either determined to false positives such as shadows, ponds, moist fields, bushes to tree crowns or were already known by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture. No papers in refereed journals were published on the study. GlobalXplorer in India was scheduled to launch in 2019, but never did and GlobalXplorer has been suspended since 2021.
In 2009, her book Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology was published by Routledge, describing the methodology of satellite archaeology. A review in Antiquity described it as focusing "more on technical methodology than interpretation and analysis," described Parcak's work as, "written in a lively style that makes a highly technical subject accessible to a general audience," and concluded that it was "a good introduction for undergraduate students of archaeology, anthropology and geography."
Her book Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past was published in July 2019 and won the Archaeological Institute of America Felicia A. Holton Book Award in 2022.
In September 2020, Parcak's employer, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, issued a statement saying that tweets by Parcak aimed toward supporters of then-president Donald Trump following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed poor judgement and did not reflect the opinions of the university.
After Rush Limbaugh's death in 2021, Parcak tweeted that she hoped Limbaugh "suffered until his last breath". The tweet was protected under the first amendment according to the ACLU of University of Alabama in spite of calls to terminate her position as a professor. In 2020, Parcak tweeted that historic monuments in Birmingham should be toppled by crowds despite her pledge to preserve historic monuments elsewhere in the world