>> Hello. I'm Joi Ito, director of the MIT media Lab and welcome to another
conversation series. For those of you are watching on Twitter, we’ll have
questions from the Twitter stream if you use a hashtag MLtalks. We will be
tracking that for questions. But today were going to introduce Sarah
Parcek. She's an associate professor and the director of the laboratory for
global observation at the University of Arizona and she's also at Nat Geo
and a Ted fellow. So, we will have her come and make a short presentation
and we will have a conversation and open up to the audience. So please
welcome Sarah. Thank you
>> Thank you. [Applause]
Thank you all very much for having me here.
I've had an incredible morning I'm just buzzing
with excitement and ideas and hopefully already developed some great
long-term collaborative activities with people here. Today, what I want to
show you is that there is so much of our past that we think we know about
but in reality, we know very little. There is a story that is just reverberating
all around the world… Maybe some of you have seen it… As it turns out,
Stonehenge was many times larger and in fact, they'd only found at
fraction of the monuments that are there. So, this has just been exploding
everywhere. This appeared, I think, one or two days ago and I read it... and
I thought the timing couldn't have been better for my talk at the media Lab.
What they've been able to use are innovative, remote sensing technologies
in order to show that this huge site that we thought we knew everything
about… Actually, as turns out, we knew very little at all. So, I want to start
off by telling you how I got into remote-sensing. In so many ancient
cultures we honor the ancestors and so I would like to honor my own
ancestor, my grandfather, Harold Young. He was a forestry professor at the
University of Maine in Orono and one of the pioneers in using aerial
photography and archeology in forestry. He's one of the reasons I took my
first remote-sensing courses at Yale. Here you see a picture -clearly this
was a long time ago almost 30 years ago...t's me with my brother in
Acadia National Park in Maine with my grandfather. This is Grampy looking
at a pair of aerial photographs are what's called a stereoscope you can
look at landscapes in 3D. I was recently… My grandfather passed away
about 15 years ago... I was looking at pictures, looking at things online and
trying to find his old research. I came across this quote that he made in a
paper in 1950: "In a relative sense, the use of aerial photos in forestry has
reached in early adolescence stage. Today the possibilities of color film
are scarcely known at all". Clearly dated to the 1950s but, I think we are at
an adolescent stage in the application of remote-sensing technologies to
archeology. So, we are kind of at a similar point where my grandfather was
in the 1950s. So, I want to tell you little bit about what satellite archaeology
or space archaeology is and why it's important to use satellite sensors in
the mapping of ancient landscapes. We all know from using Google Earth
that satellites give us an incredible perspective and allow us to see
different patterns and changes in the landscape that are really important.
But, where satellites become crucial and where they give us, and allow us
to see so much more is through the use of the light spectrum. As human
beings, we can only see in the visual part but, satellites capture data in the
near, middle, and fall far infrared. Archaeologists and anybody using
satellite data can put these different bands of information together and
manipulate them to see subtle changes in geology, soil, and vegetation
which are all crucial for understanding and excavating the past. We use
many different satellites in archaeology. Everything from what you see on
the bottom, what is called Corona high resolution spy photography, to
coarser datasets from NASA which are really important and really
important that they are free and things like high-resolution sensors from a
company called DigitalGlobe. This shows you just how much satellites
have improved in terms of their resolution over the last 40 or so years. To
me, it's really one of the most exciting times- probably the most exciting
time to be an archaeologist because there's so much available technology
it is coming down is lower and lower cost. This company DigitalGlobe has
just launched a brand-new satellite called WorldView-3. It launched about
two weeks ago. What's amazing about WorldVIew-3 is that it has a
resolution of 10 inches 30 cm. It's not just able to see into the visible and
near-infrared parts of the light spectrum but allows us to map the middle
infrared. So, this satellite sensor is going to be a game changer in
archeology. Entire ancient landscapes that are at present, totally invisible
to us are just going to be lit up and allow us to map things in a much better
way. Why is this all important? Well, we are facing a crisis today in terms
of our shared global heritage. Archaeological site looting and destruction
have been problems for thousands of years. But, the problem is getting
worse. Many of you may have seen these images from ISIL in Syria, this
absolutely wanton destruction of temples and mosques of archaeological
sites. You say, well these are temples, these are mosques we may not
know about… Well you’ll certainly know this one: this is a shrine to the
prophet Jonah- who we all know from the Bible. What ISIL and other
groups are doing is they are looting archeological artifacts. They’re taking
them. They are selling them on the black market and this is a multibillion
dollar global industry. We don't the extent of the problem but we do know it
has deep ties to drug running, gun running, international human trafficking.
No one has ever studied this as a problem before. That's one thing you can
do with satellite imagery. This is what a looted archaeological site looks
like on the ground. Thousands upon thousands of pits. This is information
that is completely lost to the world. We will never know really what this site
could've told us because that history is gone. A lot of these objects are
turning up on eBay and, in some cases, Christie's and Sotheby's. What we
have to do is cut off the source at the market but we also do would have to
do better job of stopping things internationally. We have to make collecting
antiquities similar to what happen with the fur trade. Now it's not
fashionable to wear fur -we want to make it not fashionable to own a piece
of the past. This is what objects look like that are recovered by people like
INTERPOL or the Carabinieri or indeed our own border security forces. Just
hundreds, if not thousands of objects. Where do they come from? The
context is lost. Of course, anytime you have a country in crisis like Egypt
you have museums that are looted or burned or affected. There are
thousands of pieces that are in places like the Malawi museum or think
about the Baghdadi national Museum, which was completely ransacked.
So, what we going to do to stop the problem? Well, we have to adopt a
survivor mentality. We have to outwit, outplay, and outlast the looters.
There is one we can do this: and that's through technology. So, let me tell
you little bit about how satellites work for archaeology, how we use it to
detect potentially unknown sites and features on those sites. This is a site
in the Northeast Egyptian Delta called Mendes. It’s a very well-known site
composed of multiple layers of information. You can see here there's a
brown mound… It’s a pretty large… about a kilometer north to south, half a
kilometer wide. This is a course resolution NASA satellite. You see
Mendes in the upper part of the image… there is another site, Teltomy,
below. You can still see…maybe it looks a lot like the modern times that
are next to them, but, when you begin manipulating the data and
processing the data and trying to tease out the distinct chemical signature
of the archeological site… Sometimes things are homogenous… But
sometimes… They really stand out so this is using a form of classification
to make the ancient archeological materials really kind of jump out of you.
We are able to do this for all of Egypt. In the last 13 years, I've been very
lucky not just to work in Egypt but in Tunisia, in Jordan, in Romania, in Italy,
and now a brand-new project looking for Viking sites in Europe and in
North America. What I realized, is that these technologies can be cross
applied to so many diverse landscapes. It's just a matter of thinking like
ancient peoples and thinking about where they would have put their sites,
and thinking in terms of landscapes. So, want to start off by telling you
about one of my favorite places I've worked. If any of you have ever flown
into Rome Fiumicino airport, you've flown over the site of Portis. Portis is a
very famous port. It was built by the Emperor Claudius and expanded by
the Emperor Trajan between 116 and 120 A.D. The actual port can be seen
here in this hexagonal feature. This is a reconstruction of what it used to
look like. But, a project out of Southampton University, working with my
colleagues Professor Simon Keay and Kris Strutt… they have been working
there for 30 years, using many different kinds of ground-based remote-
sensing tools to try to find different features of Portis. But, it’s a large site.
Large sites in ancient Rome would've had entertainment complexes,
similar to the ones we all know from movies like gladiator. It would've had
an amphitheater but where was it? This is the first time satellite data has
been it applied to Portis, and we first started looking in different parts of
the landscape. You can see here if you look inside the red rectangle, you
can’t really see anything there. But, using high-resolution satellite sensor
from September- when the landscape was really dry… We were able to find
a 40 x 40 m structure with 8 m thick walls you can see Eastern and
Western gates and an East to West Road. Is this an amphitheater? well we
have to excavate it for me to be able to say with the hundred percent
certainty that it is. But it’s certainly quite suspicious. This is the paper that
will be forthcoming in the Journal of archeological science. It’s just about
thinking in terms of lanscapes and what's interesting about this find is that
different ground-based sensors didn't find the structure. But the satellites
did. But flip that around there were things that the ground-based sensors
found that the satellites didn’t. So, you just have to think strategically
about where going to use technology. So, I next want to jump to Egypt. In
the Northeast Egypt and Delta, everyone knows this site. It’s called Tanis,
everyone knows Tanis from Indiana Jones. I was very much affected by
watching Indiana Jones when I was a kid. I remember the line here,
which… I can’t remember which character said it… “The Nazis have found Tanis”
… that somehow stuck with me. What’s interesting about Tanis,
which was ancient Egypt's capital city around 1000 AD for about 400
years, is that archaeologists have excavated the temples that are there
which you can see in the northern part of the site but the actual city of
Tanis had never been mapped. So, can you think of not knowing the layout
or the size of New York City or Washington DC? It’s Egypt’s largest capital
city for which we had no map. So, we are able to get, again, high-resolution
data. This is multispectral data, it’s a little bit course, but through
algorithms and processing… What we were able to do…. Sorry just to give
you an example of what it looks like… This is a very happy picture me
excavating Tanis. You can see the background the landscape is very much
homogenous you really can't see much. Walking around, this is us
confirming one of the features that we found from the satellite imagery.
But, this is processing the data. What you can see from the process
satellite data is something that looks as clear as any city map that you'd
see today. Streets… you can see buildings you can see administrative
structures, and what this shows is that the size the layout and the skills of
the ancient city… We can see actually three different distinct phases of
architectural development just from the satellite map. So, it goes to show
you that if you look you look…if you look in the right way, you'll eventually
find what you looking for. This is an example of the scale of previously
unknown sites that are found all over Egypt. So, we cross applied all of
these tools and techniques to look for sites for all of Egypt. All the pink
dots you see are previously unknown archaeological sites. In the Delta
alone, there are over 1,100 previously unknown sites I went out and did a
big survey project to confirm sites in one area and this shows you that all
over the world there are millions and millions of sites out there waiting to
be found in it's my goal to use technology to find all of them. Because how
can we protect it If we don't know where it is? So, I want to show you why
this is important. If we don't know where sites are, if we don't know how to
find them… How can we begin to protect them? This is an enormous
problem all over the world. We don't see site looting just in Egypt. We see it
in Peru, we see it in North America, we see it in Africa, we see it in China,
we see it in India and the biggest problem is that there's not a single
country anywhere in the world that has a detailed database of all of its
known archaeological sites. We don't even have this here in America. So,
I’ll tell you the story of how I got involved with doing cultural heritage
mapping. If you' all remember these images from January late January
2012… 2011, excuse me. Thousands upon thousands of people protesting
in Tahrir square in Egypt. Well, just a few days later my heart broke when I
woke up and I realized that the Cairo Museum had been looted. Initially, we
did not know the extent of the looting or the number of objects that had
been taken. We all feared that it was exactly the same thing that happened
to the Baghdad national museum. Fortunately, of course, it wasn't that bad,
but, we also started hearing rumors of archeological sites being affected
by looting. We didn’t know the scale or extent or where it was happening.
So, I started a Facebook group called Restore and Save the Egyptian
Museum as kind of a meeting ground for people to post questions about
sites they heard were affected. We would then field those questions out to
our Egyptian and colleagues who could then go and check things out and
figure out what's going on the ground. At that point, National Geographic
contacted me and said, “Can you say for certain if sites are being looted?
We will provide you with some funding for satellite data…” So, we got some
high-resolution satellite imagery, and we looked at sites in the pyramid
fields. Now this is what looting looks like on the ground. Okay, uou can see
looting pits. How many of them are there? How big are they? You don't
want to get to close, by the way, because there are men with Kalashnikovs
that will drive you off. This is a very, very dirty business so this is a before
image from 2010… And this is about an hour and a half south of Cairo, it’s
a flat landscape, you really can’t see anything. It's from the end of 2010,
and this is from the middle of February 2011 you can see about 200
looting pits, you can see evidence of bulldozing… this is from May 2011.
You can see the landscape has been bulldozed and they're actually
preparing it to build an illegal cemetery which is also a big business. So,
we also realize we had a problem on our hands. We expanded the search
for looting to the entirety of the pyramid fields. We started looking at
where it occurred, when it occurred, and why and just started mapping the
problem. This is what a looting pit looks like on the ground. It can be
anywhere from a meter to 3 meters long or wide. The looters know exactly
where to go. They know where to target tombs. They go down… You can
see I am much less happy here than you saw me in the Tanis picture.
Some of these tombs were indeed intact. We found bone, bits of pot, bits
of coffin. So, the looters were clearly finding things that were there. Just to
show you progression of one site this is a famous pyramid of a king from
the middle Kingdom so about 100 A.D. 2010 there's no looting… 2011
there’s some… It starts getting worse…and in 2012… In 2013 there are over
600 looting pits and the cemetery has expanded onto archaeological
lands. So, we looked at the pyramid fields and, and in the pyramid felids
alone, we saw an increase in site looting of over 1000% from 2011, 2013,
2014. So, we’ve expanded the study across all of Egypt with generous
funding from National Geographic. We’ve mapped site looting going back
to 2002. What we have found is that it's not as straightforward as you think
it's not a black or white issue. It is very closely connected to complex
social political and economic events of each year. So, you have to
understand things in their totality but it’s certainly has gotten significantly
worse since 2011. So, I'm a big fan of tilting at windmills and I think what
we can do for the first time is we can use things like crowdsourcing and
this new technology to map patterns of archeological looting all over the
world. Is it a $6 billion a year issue? Is it $100 billion a year issue. Is it a $1
trillion a year issue? At what point do we start realizing that looting
archaeological sites and the illegal sales of antiquities is just as big a
problem as the illegal sale of guns or drugs. I personally believe after
working as an Egyptologist for 15 years, that the looting of archaeological
sites represents the lowest hanging fruit possible for criminals. No one
knows where the sites are. Like I said, there's hundreds of thousands if not
millions of these sites all over the world that are not known. We don't know
where they are. Most of them aren’t unprotected. So, if we don't map them,
we don't know where they are and we can't begin to protect them. So, what
we do? I mentioned crowdsourcing. I'm collaborating with DigitalGlobe
right now, a company that provides so much high resolution data. What we
are hoping to do is set up an online platform whereby people from all over
the world can login and only help in the search of archaeological sites, but
also help map looting and the hardest thing to do is going and drawing
tens of thousands of polygons around looting pits. That’s something I
think we can outsource to the crowd. I'm hopefully going to be going to
Egypt in December and setting up a geospatial heritage technology
training panel for my egyptian colleagues. The key is to work with them
and share open-source technologies like Google Earth with them on their
smart phone so they can be active players in terms of protecting their
sites. We want to train them to go out and map sites that have been
affected by looting and create a national database so that people can
share in this information. One of my big dreams is to set up maker spaces
in Egypt to engage the public in terms of protecting sites. You know the
kids in Egypt, the teens the young adults, there is so much untapped
potential and creativity there. I think it is our job to help nurture that and
help give them the tools they need because ultimately, it's only at the
community level where you find your stakeholders that are going to help
you in terms of protecting your sites.I think using technologies like
WorldView-3 are going to be unbelievably helpful in terms of mapping the
past. Well, then you have the “so what” factor… Why should we care? What
archaeology does for us is that it reveals our shared common humanity.
Ultimately, we have absolutely not changed at all. In the last 50-100,000 or
so years. Yes, our technology may have evolved but our common humanity
hasn't. Just as an example, we think bling is something that’s only
happened in the past 25 or 30 years and yet the Egyptians were the Kings
and Queens of bling. I love this love poem from the new kingdom, from
3,500 years ago. “My heart flutters hastily when I think of my love for you.
It lets me not act sensibly. It leaps from its place it. It lets me not put on a
dress nor wrap my scarf around me. I put no paint upon my eyes. I'm not
even anointed. Let not the people say of me a woman fallen through love.
Be steady when you think of him. My heart, do not flutter”. You know, all of
these passions and these feelings and these emotions that we think are so
modern are not modern at all. As a final thought for you- as I said again-
we think were so evolved. We think we have all these cool new tools and
technologies today and yet thousands of years ago. It was the Egyptians
who were the first ones to brag on walls and share pictures of cats. Thank
you very much.
[Applause]
>> Thank you, Sarah. So, until I saw your Ted talk, I didn't even realize
there was actually a thing called space archaeology.
At first, I thought it was the archaeology of space but what…
How big is that field?We talk about being anti-discipline and inter-discipline.
How do sensors and archeologists get together or is that an old relationship?
>> So, that’s an interesting question. A lot of emails I get are from people
who think I'm looking for aliens. [laughter] I get very interesting
emails. I think the field has really grown in the last 10 or so
years with the availability of high resolution data. The cost has really come
down a lot in price. There’s definitely a core group of us that are working
on this problem together. But, I have colleagues that are doing incredible
work in places like Cambodia. You know, they really realize that Angkor
Wat was three times as large by using point cloud data. My colleagues are
doing this work in Britain with what we see with Stonehenge. I have
colleagues who are looking at sites in Central America and they’re finding
entire cities hidden beneath the rain forest. So I think as people realize we
only have a limited amount of time to map these sites they are innovating
and they are using this new technology so I think there's more and more
archaeologists who are using it.
>> And what do you get if you find a site? I know if you find a star
you might get to name it, or if you find a wreck you get something out of it.
If somebody, an amateur, is looking at satellite
photos and they find something what do they get?
>> I guess the satisfaction of knowing they have found this completely
hidden piece of history… You know we name archaeological sites,
if we find something new, we try to be sensitive to the
local culture, or, come up with creative names like site 345.
[Laughter]
It's really up to the Egyptian government- or whatever government
is working there-to name it. But, I mean the local public has been
really invaluable. I get emails… lots of interesting emails, but some of them
are really useful. You know “Well, I was looking on Google Earth
and I found this really interesting thing” … and sometimes that thing turns
out to be a settlement or a structure.
>> And that's how... you were talking about crowd-sourcing…
how organized is crowdsourcing? For instance, with space there
are all these clubs were people do that. Is there a whole
Internet, sort of, movement around archaeology crowdsourcing or
amateur archaeology?
>> I want to create one. [Cross talk]
>> Ok, so, this would be a new thing…
>> Yeah…totally new. So, we are going to start at DigitalGlobe with using the mapping of looting sites
but, we want to expand it to slightly processed data
where people can look for new features.
>> You were saying there’s some proprietary stuff but
a lot of that satellite imaging is available right?
>> Right. Yes
. >> So are you…would you… are you going make it into a game?
How…Do you have any thoughts on the design of this or…?
>> Yeah, I think you’re right, yeah. You have to create some kind of game with…
I don't know whether you give people prizes or titles or they become…
you know…you go from…oh well, you get the Brendan Frasier
rating and only after searching after X number of hours and finding X number
of things you get the Indiana Jones rating. [Laughter]
Yeah, you can create whatever ranks or games or the ratings
you want but I think you making it into something like a game you can
create communities of people and you get the top 100 or 10,000 people
that are the best at finding things and you get them talking and trading
ideas and tips. That's the way to do it.
>> Do you…you consider yourself and explorer, right?
>> Yes.
>> How much time do you actually physically spend exploring versus…
sort of, going through data?
>> I probably spend the majority of my time doing data processing and analysis.
Every time I go to Egypt it's usually for a restricted
amount of time whether it's two weeks a month up to two months in the field.
It also depends on the type of work were doing if the fieldwork
is the most important part of doing this, you can say you
found something, but then you have to go excavate
and survey to confirm what it is you found because you may think you
found one thing but it actually turns out to be something else maybe it's
not there. Then you go back and you'll find your tools and your methods.
So, yeah, every year usually between a month to two months we try to go.
>> You said she was your friend, but, we had Katie Croff Bell here the
other day and it seems almost like the inside out of what she does where
she physically goes to places and then has experts come in remotely and
you're having… You’re going to try to create amateurs that help you get
there and then you send experts there, physically, right?
>> Yes.
>> But there's a lot of similarities between advanced technologies
helping you find things that never would’ve found before.
What are the new things and sensors and stuff that you are excited about?
>> I can show you if I can flip to the end… If that'll still work… there we go.
Okay… so yeah… this is a project that I did in collaboration with
Cluj University in Romania. There's a really famous site there called
Sarmisegetusa Regina and it was the ancient capital of the Dacians
and the Emperor Trajan actually came in and wanted this particular site
because it had lead mines and lots of
other natural resources but you can see the very top of the site right there
and that's all that's you can see you literally can't see the forest for the
trees or what else is there. We used point cloud data collection system
called Lidar and we stripped away the trees. You can actually see the
entirety of the land off the central part of the city of Sarmi, as it’s
nicknamed. So, what you can see with the red arrows… it's the actual
outline of what we think is a large fort and ditch enclosure that the
Romans built. You can actually see some trenches across it and
apparently archaeologists have been excavating it for 20 years but they
did know what it was and when they could finally see for themselves the
whole thing at once… They knew what it was.
>> In the field of archaeology, how much of this data
is being put into… and where does it live? Is it in little pockets?
I mean with scientific data one of the things… for biology is that
everybody sort of keeps their own data and they publish the results.
It's really difficult. Is there a commons where you're sharing data
or are there enough people to be sharing this with?
>> I think there's a bit of a generational gap in archaeology and where people…
we’re all competing for limited resources
but I think there's much more of a push to have data sharing and open data.
Now, we have to be careful because we really don’t want the really good
resolution data of where sites are located to fall into
the hands of looters but there are ways you can work around that.
I think it is really important because so many people working
in different fields are going to have insights. You know, I am biased
because I’ve been an Egyptologist and that's what I’ve been studying for
nearly 20 years. But, one of my colleagues who works in central America
or colleagues in China can look at my data and say, “You know, that's a
really interesting interspatial relationship. In China, we have this temple
and its oriented this way have you thought about X?” I’ve had that happen
to me before so I’d love for the data to be more open.
>> Interesting, and where do you see this field
going in addition to the crowdsourcing? And I mean, how many of you are there?
>> I … That's a good question. Five years ago,
I could’ve answered that question but today at the big
archaeology conferences there's multiple panels now that are dedicated
to remote-sensing and using satellites and landscape archaeology. I think
our numbers are probably up in the hundreds now. You know people are
using it all over the world but, I can't tell you… I mean maybe 95 to 99% of
the planet has not been mapped in terms of searching for archaeological
sites. I think what could potentially be under the rain forests of South
America? We all know where Machu Picchu is. Are there other sites out
there like Machu Picchu that have been covered over by rain forest or by
trees? I think they're out there. The biggest challenge right now is that
while the cost of satellites has come down… you know single satellite
images run between $500- $1,000, sensor systems like Lidar have to be
flown in airplanes and that's really expensive. I think innovating with
sensors and coming up with new ways to map and collecting point cloud
data with drones…I think that could have a huge possibility and potential
for archaeology.
>> What do you do about the looters? You find them, and you map them,
do you just tell the local police? They seem… I assume
they're part of the whole system…
>> I mean the corruption is everywhere and, in some cases, it goes
or can go all the way to the top. I think it's creating local buy-in
that’s really important. It's really interesting if you look at the…
not just the site of Luxor but luxuries to be in a major
Egyptian capital and it has most of Egypt's monuments, but all of the
people who live in Luxor, or nearly all of them, have some connection to
tourism because of the archaeology. My very dear friend named Omar
Faruk, he’s my egyptian brother, shortly after the revolution began there
was a group of looters that tried to attack Karnak Temple and hack off
some of the reliefs and Omar and six of his friends actually fought off
these looters who had guns. They were under gunfire but they fought
them off. I think there are hundreds of stories of bravery like this from
Egypt and from all over the world. These cultural heroes that are
protecting sites. It's one of the reasons why we've seen looting in places
like Luxor but it's such a hard problem and I… I do not have the answers
for how to stop it.
>> There's a really interesting random parallel. We were just in Nairobi
and there were group of anti-poachers… It gets into it but…
they always start with… Kenya is known for its wild animals and what
would we be without them? We have to protect them… we had students
go in and try to figure out how to sense for poachers but that's probably
right… It’s their heritage and you have to get… mobilize local people but…
You said that the looters though, seem to have the ability to find the sites
but how do they do it? Do they use the same data that you have?
>> I'm sure they're using things like Google Earth.
I've gotten a number of emails from people and if they kind of seem legitimate,
and I can find them easily online, I double check before I respond.
But I've gotten a lot of emails from people in Egypt and the Middle East
saying, “Hey I think I found a site what you think?”
If it seems sketchy, I don't respond. I think creating innovative sensory
detection systems that are low cost or were invented
by local people to protect sites… Making all this data open accessible to
people all over Egypt in Arabic so that is accessible to everyone and
schoolkids…I think the misconception is that people Egypt don't care
about their sites or are too busy looting but they're very passionate about
the history and very proud of it. I remember one time when I was in the
middle of nowhere in upper Egypt and I talked to a farmer about a site and
he said “Are you talking about the Roman site or the Pharaonic site?” This
is someone who probably barely had a middle school education. So, we
have to tap that knowledge and that passion.
>> Interesting. I think there might be some questions from Twitter…
>> You said passion… There's a group there called Lifelong Kindergarten
and we talk about creative learning which is what we try to
do at the media Lab and we talk about four P’s which is:
projects, peers, passion and play. And what’s interesting
about what you're talking about, which… I am glad some of our sensor
team are here is that in many ways, were looking for cool projects at the
lab and to be able to just think about how we could turn the Center for
Global Sensing which is funded by people who are interested in oil fields
we could turn around and learn about the history of the Roman empire
which is really cool. Stacy, do we have any questions, yet…or not…
[Background chatter]
>> Oh, Shao Shao is here.
[Background chatter].
Do you have any questions?
>> No I have too many questions
>> [Laughter]You have too many questions? Why don’t you…can we give Shao Shao a mic?
>> Yeah. You know what? Maybe. Let me go through which questions I've asked and try to ask…
okay, so, I think one of the things that came up is how do we protect
the sites and how do we stop the looters? And how do we…
another part of the big picture is how do we keep the people who collect
these things from wanting more thing. Making it less fashionable…
From the looters point of view…people I guess, looking at these looters
they very smart and they're also really desperate and they're probably
only looting because they don't have, like, better alternatives
of employment. I was just trying to think of is there a way
of looking at the big ecosystem of people who collect, people who
loot, people want to study them, to figure out a way to give these looters
who actually seem to be very skilled, some alternative of employment so
that they wouldn't be constantly looting.
>> You bring up a great point. This is deeply rooted in economic issues,
you know, post Arab spring, inflation in Egypt
has gotten out of control and this semi safety network
that was in place that was kind of keeping some of the poorest people in
Egypt able to function, almost of evaporated. We all would loot sites if it
meant feeding our family and sending our kids to school. But, I think one
of the big challenges is that we don't understand the networks. We don't
understand how the objects are getting from the looters, to the
middlemen, to the collectors so that's one avenue I think we need to study
and whether were doing computing look at the silk Road or illegal looters
on Facebook I have a colleague at UAB named Gary Warner with whom I
will be collaborating with on this issue. But, the other thing is to we have
to think better about how we can develop things like ecotourism and how
to develop these well-known archaeological sites. You know, at present,
there are a couple hundred different foreign groups working in Egypt,
which is an enormous privilege. But, you know how is it that we can
engage the local people and getting them working year-round at
archaeological sites. If you're a tourist you go to the pyramids, you go to
the Luxor, and you go down a tour of the Nile River. That's only part of
what there is to see how can we expand tourism horizons? So yeah that's
a great question.
>> Joe…okay and then…Ok, Hiro Shi-… Ok, go first.
>> Thank you very much. I'm Hiro Shishi. I am so fascinated because I love
astronomical archaeology. Because, I went to Inca Maya, so my question
is that the title of the talk was seeing the past from the space. But I'm very
interested about your insight toward the future. If you fast-forward the
clock say 3,000 this might be the ruins. My machine, my body, my object
for the archaeologist. So many great civilizations fell down, fell apart,
perished, so as archaeologist studying about the cultures and civilizations
and nations what is your insight to the future?
>> You've touched on one of my favorite things to talk about.
I’ll give you a story and this is work I've done.
So, when we mapped all of these thousands of archaeological sites
in the Delta, we looked at all these known sites, and the time periods from
which they dated. We looked at settlement patterns and how they
changed over time. At the end of Egypt's old Kingdom… so this is about
2200 BC, pyramid building stopped. Foreign expedition stopped. The
language… The writing took a nosedive in quality. The arts- just terrible.
The entirety of Egypt experienced a major collapse. So, it’s the end of the
old Kingdom moving into what was known as the first intermediate
period, great chaos, political instability multiple kings serving short reigns.
And everyone's looked at social and political and economic reasons for
this collapse. But, I think the main reason that the old Kingdom of Egypt
collapsed was because of a major global environmental shift. It's called
the 4.2 K BP event. It is something that has been well documented in the
dozens if not hundreds of peer reviewed papers that I found similar
evidence for massive climate change in India and across the
Mediterranean and North America. What happened was because of the
global climate change- like an ancient El Niño effect- the monsoon rains
that filled up the basins of the blue and the White Nile, they virtually
stopped. Ancient Egypt didn't experience floods of the same level for
5,200 years so we see in the old Kingdom with the settlement pattern
data is that all these cities just disappear. You go from 40 sites down to a
handful. I think what's amazing to me… You have this great collapse will
Egypt make it or won't it? And yet, after the first intermediate. Around 850 A.D.,
you have the middle Kingdom. You have a Renaissance, you have
this incredible explosion of creativity. The art for the middle kingdom is
exquisite. So out of destruction and chaos you have rebirth and
resurgence. So, I think this is a lot about our ability as human beings to be
creative and resilient and I think this is just one example of many from the
ancient archaeological record. You know I have great hope for our
humanity and our ability to survive. Because of what we seen in ancient
civilizations. We've almost been at the breaking point or tip of absolute
and utter collapse and maybe civilization doesn't survive but humanity does.
>> Thank you.
>> This is great talk on many levels, but looking at the technology…
I had a question. It's amazing what you do with just light.
You're pulling all these features of things you cannot see because they're
buried or they’re in vegetation. By using light, and getting down to the
infrared, and playing a lot of games with signal processing. When I first
heard about this kind of work, it was synthetic aperture radar because
that can see naturally through sand at all these things are revealed it was
amazing for everybody, but you did mention that at all. So, what's the
prognosis for that? Or, is light just so good that you don't need it?
>> Actually I use as many sensors as I get my hands on.
I'm working on a collaborative project right now with my colleagues
at the Chinese Academy of sciences. the Institute for
remote-sensing and digital earth.
This one group focuses on the application of remote sensing to
archaeology and I have a colleague who does work specifically with radar
data so we have what's called RADARSAT2 which is high resolution radar
data. It has about an 8 m resolution and we got a radar image of the
entirety of the pyramid fields. We’ve just began this collaboration and
she's just begun to process it and we are going back and forth. So, I think
radar has revealed many, many features in archaeology and it's something
that I use as well.
>> Radar can go deeper into the ground and it can
potentially penetrate foliage, if its dry, and you can see a lot more …
>> You can and, I mean, he biggest challenge with radar we have is
resolution. I was told that this sensor system had an 8 m resolution. It
may be closer to 12 or 15 but even then…if it's. a buried, say, pyramid
foundation it is going to be 30,40, 50 m wide and we’re going to be able to see it.
>> You could take an aircraft over and get a much better look with a
sar or even do it with a drone potentially.
>> In some countries that’s easy to do but in other countries, like Egypt,
it's a little bit more challenging… [cross talk]
>> But I have to be an optimist about it. But yeah radar is an incredible tool.
>> I can’t stop asking this question but, uh, archaeological digs
on the site seems fascinating because to learn about past cultures
or life and get the information, you’re also destroying something. This
dilemma is so exciting in some concept. How you really deal with… what
information you really get in return of destroying physical stuff and also
information? How you overcome or deal with the dilemma?
>> I tell my students on day one introductory archaeology,
“To dig is to destroy”. How else are you going to get information about the past?
On the other hand, context is everything you know
you see these looted objects… they have no context.
You don't know where they came from or what on what level
or what time period. You lose all that information. We have very detailed
recording sheets that we use. We photograph everything, we map
everything, we draw thing, save every little bit and piece you can imagine.
But then I think often well, look at the archaeology that was done hundred
years ago and today we think well they were so primitive in the way that
they approach things well, we are primitive in the way that we are digging
now because in a hundred years it will be different. So, I wonder can we
invent completely noninvasive ways to excavate? Can we do buried, 3-D
detailed mapping of archeological features so that… maybe we are
interested in burial so, we just focus on that one area where there's a
burial and we don't have to destroy what's around it? We’re so concerned.
My colleagues and I, all the time… you know, “What are we doing?” Our
future colleagues are going to do such a better job at this that we are t
oday. Archaeology is so addictive. I love it. I never outgrew the sandbox
and playing with colors I tell people I'm just still in kindergarten. Every
brushstroke… You just never know what you're going to find. It's so
exciting so… I know to dig is to destroy but at the same time it's… as one
of my colleagues says it's the most fun you can have with your pants on.
>> I think on a bit larger scale like a city like Florence…Firenze, it's so
beautiful… Because it's been forced to preserve but also that’s prevented
it from new development…how do you advise about preserving the great
cultural aesthetic versus taking the opportunity to create something new
at the cost of destroying the past?
>> At different …this is such a huge issue all over the world
because every country has different rules and
regulations about what you need to do to preserve things. In the US, they
have this cultural and historical preservation act called section 106.
Anytime you do any kind of construction you have to bring in a culture
resource management firm to make sure that you're not destroying a
Native American mound or something else -this still happens. You know,
England has very strict rules and regulations and English heritage does
such a great job of it but in other countries, you don't see this. I think of a
case from Istanbul trying to expand one of their ports. The project has
gone sort of years beyond when they expected to complete it and many
millions of dollars over budget because, wouldn't you know it, they run
into in ancient remains. In so many cities like Florence or Rome or
Istanbul or Mexico City this is what are called layered cities. Layer, upon
layer, upon layer … I was talking with Joi earlier about his visit to
Damascus and he visited a house…one of the houses had an ancient
roman dining room… It's a challenge but I think we need to be better about
using innovative construction materials. Can we some kind of clear
plastic something where people can actually see the layers? But you have
the structure on top. I would love to come up with new ways of protecting
buried features that we don't have to take them dig through them… I mean
look what happened with the Athens Olympics. We did know whether or
not they would pull off the Olympics because the subway system they had
created, of course, was going through most of ancient Athens. So, this is
a big challenge.
>> Thank you.
>> ShaoShao…
>> Yeah. Hi, so another question.
So, when we talk about digging up artifacts. One question that I
was thinking about earlier is where does the ownership for these things
lie? Where should they go? Should they stay at the site, should they go to
museums, should they go to the scholars? The countries? I have no idea
what the right answer is that and perhaps culturally, people have different
opinions I was wonder what people think.
>> When we work in Egypt, 100%
of everything we find is owned by the government of Egypt. We
aren't even allowed to bring out a tiny potsherd or a fragment of a stone
out of the country. They are very strict rules. So, what happens is at the
end of the dig season, you box up your pottery and your finds and if you
find anything really spectacular the Egyptian government will come in
once it's been officially registered and photographed and fully recorded.
They will take it for display either in the regional Museum or in the
national Museum and then you can end up setting up great partnerships
that way. But, things like potsherds and scarabs there are millions of
them. They tend to be in storehouses kind of in perpetuity and this is a
problem because so many storehouses in Egypt and all over the Middle
East and the world are looted. So, one thing that I would love to do with
the Egyptian government is to digitize these millions and millions of
objects. You go in and you train local Egyptians and it's a way to employ
them and these are very bright young men and women who are trained in
archeology that don't have jobs. They take pictures they require them it's all online.
Egypt has had so many thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of
excavations and they found hundreds of millions of objects that anyone in
the world can see. Can you imagine what our path…how our past
would be different if all these tens of millions of objects or hundreds of
millions of objects billions of objects over the world were all online,
openly available, open-source and everyone could do research on them? I
think that's what we need to do because if its online, in some sense, it’s
protected. Because that single object, if it goes and it's taken and is on
the illegal antiquities market, we’re going to know where it came from
because you can see it online. These are things we have to be thinking about.
>> It seems to me that the scary part about this is as exciting as it
is for it to be easier to finding stuff – it’s going to be easier for the
looters, right? It feels like until we solve that problem you're going to have
amateur looters just like you’re going to have amateur scientists I can
imagine that it’s something somewhere between Indiana Jones and 24,
where you have people running around competing with these looters.
But, is that the future like, if you just take what you hope will happen…
what do you think is most likely going to happen with this looter
problem? Again, if the resolution is getting better and is open, anybody
will be able to start getting it… You also do want to do a closed version,
you don't want to only have certified anthropologist allowed to look at the
data either right?
>> Right…I think step one is quantifying the scale of the problem.
It scares me because I know how hard the problem is in Egypt.
We’re beginning to do work in Syria and Peru and we are beginning to
have a sense of the scale the problem. But, step one: find all of the sites.
Step two: develop a sense of scale of where it’s going. But, I think if you
have a map of every known or visible archaeological site in the world,
and you have regular data capture, whether it's from sensors that are on
the sites or local people that are geo-tagging what they see is going on or
people doing crowdsourcing, then all of a sudden, you’ve got a map of
the globe in front of you, and you’re able to see hotspots. Hotspots
popping up of sites that are being affected and then once you see those
hotspots you can zoom in, connect with experts working on that ar. Alert
the Carabinieri or the Interpol or whatever international groups are
working on trying to track where these objects could be coming in, and
the types of objects that could be coming in. One of the things I didn’t
mention is that one of the big advantages of being able to map a single
looting pit on the site is… I, more often than not, I will be able to tell you
the likely objects that are going to be coming off that site…okay we know
this is from that part of the site…. this is from the middle kingdom this is
from the middle kingdom because tombs from the middle kingdom have
this range of objects. Even though we can't see what's been taken, I can
tell international authorities about the types of things they should be
looking for. I think we do need to think this big about the issue. You're
right, it's such a complicated problem. It’s something that… if we don't
map it now… we are not going to begin to be able to stop the problem.
>> Back there… and then Hiro Shi
>> Forgive my ignorance of academic archaeology.
But, if it's all available online what encourages you or any
other researcher to go digging when they can wait for somebody else to put it online?
>> You mean just searching for online?
>> No, but if eventually, it’s all available to everybody online…
whatever that is you dig out…
>> There's so many assumptions we've made about the
archeological record. And yet it seems like every week we find… Well, the
cave paintings are actually they come from thousands of years earlier
than we thought. Or, that dogs were domesticated much earlier…. this
particular environmental event deeply affected this past civilization and
that's why it's collapsed. I think we have all this great data.
Ultimately,what it allows us to ask much better questions about the past.
The more data you have, the better you can frame your questions about
how ancient peoples lived and died. But, I think we do need to share more
data online… I can't tell you how many times I've assumed X about the
data I'm dealing with, or how a site should look, and what I'm going to
find at a certain place and I'm usually wrong. I think what doing this work
is taught me and looking at things at a larger scale is just how humble
archaeologists need to be. The past ... we think it’s static but it was very
fluid. I think we need all this data to be able to think differently and
challenge ourselves to figure out how we are going to get out of the
mess today we are in today…Ancient peoples did… What can we learn
from them?
>> I really appreciate your battle against a lot of looters to nearly
destroy our heritage. But, in history, maybe not we call looters but
the big country, the Army brought everything to London, Paris, New York,
Boston with a totally different benefit for protecting against those looters
you're fighting. We can learn so much. The interesting ambivalence... I'm
interested because recently many countries… Greece or… protested to try
to get the stuff back, but also, in the long run, preserving all this stuff is
one very secure museum also makes huge sense. So, I'm interested in
your comments about this contradiction.
>> This is an incredibly controversial issue in archaeology.
The most famous case that we all know is of Greece
wanting the Elgin marbles back. You have to look at ownership
and the laws that were in place at the time. More often than
not, they were murky but most of the time things were stolen. They were
taken in ways they shouldn't have been taken out. So, this is the question
of who owns the past? I try to look at all sides of the equation and I
sympathize deeply with Greece or Egypt wants back the Rosetta Stone,
they want the back the head of Nefertiti… these are iconic objects that
have helped to shape the story of ancient Egypt. On the other hand,
millions and of tourists every year go to the Met, and the MFA, and the
British Museum, or the Louvre or wherever and these are people that may
not have the money or the resources or the time to visit other countries.
When I was a child, getting to go to museums and see objects is was one
of the reasons that I’m an archaeologist. If I hadn't done it or if I hadn't
seen it, I wouldn't have been inspired and I think any archaeologist would
tell you the same thing… I think you can be a little creative. If there's an
iconic object that a country wants back, maybe work out something like a
long-term loan agreement where you get objects that weren’t allowed to
travel outside the country and in exchange you set up training programs…
I think is a very sensitive issue and I think you have to respect where
each individual country is coming from. Be willing to sit down and have a
dialogue. But, I think with the case that just happened between Yale
University and Peru that National Geographic help mediate… They got all
the items of Machu Picchu back. They weren’t supposed to have them.
Now the government of Peru has them. It's a huge issue. It's a debate
that will not be ending for a long time.
>> I personally… I used to run creative common…
and I would run into the weirder version of this, which
is that they extend the rights into information. So, I remember in Egypt
they tried to assert that they had perpetual rights on stories about Egypt.
So, that's kind of interesting. And the other thing is, a lot of countries do
not give you freedom of panoramas… So, I took a picture of Burj Khalifa
in Dubai and Wikipedia will take it down because you're not allowed to
take pictures of architectures in UAE because they are copyrighted. We,
in America, feel that we have freedom for information. But it's tricky when
countries start to own their heritage. it’s an interesting and then it starts
to extend into the digital world… it starts to limit freedom. It’s an
interesting intuition that this is our heritage. But then…and now, I am
getting away on a tangent but on the flipside is the opposite… which is, I
think, Third World debt. You have debts that countries have accumulated
because of bad dictators and now people are paying them back that had
nothing to do with creating the debts. It’s very…when you start to think
about global scale, global culture and global assets and global heritage, I
think there's a really interesting conversation to be had. I don’t know
whether it's UNESCO or whoever but… because some countries lose the
ability to protect in moments of weakness. Is it incumbent on the world
because that heritage may not even be…Sometimes in some of these
places that you go, the stuff under the soil isn't affiliated with the culture
that's on top of the soil, it may have shifted over. Even a thousand miles
like graves and stuff like that I think it's a really just a really interesting
conversation. Is it something that you guys talk about? You said is a big
topic. Who talks about that right now?
>> I think anyone working in another country or even in the US
with the North American graves and repatriation act passed in 1991…
if you're going to do archaeological
work on Native American sites you have to have at least make an
attempt to have a dialogue with modern groups or modern Native
American groups that could potentially be affiliated with that site to
respect their rights and their desires you know with what's going on
there. Some communities feel very closely connected to the past. They
are very proud of archaeological sites. Whereas, others may not seem to
care about it, or not care as much. I think the key, certainly locally, is
involving local communities as much is possible you know if I'm doing
excavation or survey work we will sit down with local religious leaders,
school kids, have them gives tours of sites…so that will be welcomed
back there. So, the issue is so complicated… I think the Egyptian
government, not that long ago, tried to make a claim for the pyramid on
the dollar and try to get ownership of… or partially revenue from the Luxor in …
[laughter]
in Las Vegas. But, yeah… who owns these images?
Certainly, Egypt isn't the only culture in the world that has pyramids. Not
that it’s related to pyramids in central America at all but, it's interesting,
architecturally, how and why people build these large structures. Yeah, it’s
such a complicated problem, but it is something we talk about a lot.
>> Right there…
>> You mentioned gaming before and using the public in
terms of gaming. Can you say more about that? Would there be a
hypothesis about the civilization and you’d have all of the archaeological
piece parts, sort of like Minecraft, and some kids would put all together
into a civilization?
>> I think, initially, depending on… we could really look
anywhere in the world you know, DigitalGlobe has all this great data… You
know initially we might pick a landscape where archaeologists haven’t
focused as much. We say today archaeologists have found five
archaeological sites on this landscape this is what they know about this
civilization based on the assumptions that they’ve made. We are
challenging you to help us think differently. Could there have been
additional sites there? This text talks about these three great cities that
archaeologists haven't found yet… Could they be here? Will you be the one
help me find these things? People get the little tiles of information, put
down points, and maybe over time, based on what people find and… we
share with archaeologists maybe excavate or explorer… there's this
interesting feedback it takes place. Now that people that have found
these things essentially have buy-in to what’s going on in the field. Then
we say to the archeologists going into the field. Okay you’re getting all
this free data that is essentially free analysis… You gotta think for your
supper. As you excavate, you’ve got to do blog posts and maybe have a
Google hang out and figure out ways to connect with people here
because they might do the same things my colleagues at work- in the
other parts of the world- maybe they have interesting insights or
questions that will challenge you to think about the data that’s in front of
you. That will get a lot more interest in the field of archaeology because I
think, to a large extent, the public doesn’t feel as engaged as it could be.
It's very academic and focused on the ivory tower but I think we owe it to
everyone. Everyone gets passionate and excited about archaeology and
why wouldn’t they?
>> How much do you collaborate with climatologists or
anthropologists and other people that look at things at that scale?
Because, it seems like local people will know information that you might
want, or you know a lot about about a historical climate change event
that may affect that how we look at signals in our current climate change
and also the fact that Congress isn’t funding any climate change data
collection. Do you kind of hang out with those people?
>> One of my close collaborators right now, a gentleman
named Pearce Paul Creasman, he is at the Tree Ring Institute
at the University of Arizona and
we’ve collaborated on some projects and some papers. And he now has
a much broader perspective because he studies climatology sort of long
term. We are hopefully going to be working together on some projects
looking at chronology in Egypt. Right now, the further you go back in time
the more error you get in terms of your dates. If you do radiocarbon
dating on something even if it's calibrated you get a plus minus reading
of between 50 and 100 years. That's simply not good enough. Tree ring
dating gets the exact year. We are hoping that we can do tests on objects
in Egypt and other parts of the Mediterranean to get a better sense of
timing and dating and also get look at these bigger climate change
events. So yeah certainly I collaborate with as broadly as I can with
people who think bigger.
>> Do you ever think of planting things for future archaeologists
to let them know about things that happened …when we
have our extinction event?
[Laughter]
>> I’ve actually thought about this. I’ve thought, like, what would I leave behind?
And that’s interesting because in cases, as you’re digging…
people didn’t necessarily have time to think about what they would take.
We look at places like Pompeii, where people literally left their fires burning…
their meals cooking - if they were able to get out at all.
Or an army comes in… you kind of take what
you can…or, the river used to flow by your town and it used to flow
successfully and economically and the river shifts and you have to take
what you can with you. So, I wonder what do I want future people to know
about me? Part of me thinks: do I want to be cremated or actually do I
want to have my skeleton behind so that future archaeologists can dig it
up find out information about me… I dunno …I wonder.
>> There's another interesting thread right now.
We have a thing that's called MIT big claim projects…
I'm diving to the history of money. There's an interesting theory
which is, I think, true. Everyone thinks that money has to do with golden
coins and that it was a commodity but it turns out that that's one of the
few things that you find in digs but it turns out that there were lots of
different forms of money that just didn't preserve as well. Ledgers and
things like that and so it's interesting how skewed our history is by
focusing on those things that are easy to dig up. It will be an interesting
thing about the digital stuff… Maybe digital archaeology in the future, but
as of now… It is interesting that the ability to be preserved changes so
much with the footprint of a civilization is.
>> Think about this, you know, when I was growing up, my parents
were in the restaurant business. They
had a black and green computer you had to have multiple boot disks, we
had this one cat and mouse game that was awful but we played it again
and again because we thought that it was a coolest thing ever. Think
about excavating computers. You have so many computers where things
are stored… how do you convert from a floppy disk to a CD? How are we
going to preserve all of this information I think that's an interesting future
field. I think there may be some people working on that that right now. It
is certainly not what I specialize in.
>> Any other questions? There’s one there…
>> So, you mentioned using drones as a way to map a lot more
territory throughout the world. How could that be financed? Would that
require government buy-in? Or, what tools would be accessible to make
that possible?
>> Several of my colleagues are actually using simple drones
right now. Whether it's mapping looting or of course in
archaeology, as your excavating you want to make sure you get good
high-resolution picture of sites. I'm collaborating with a gentleman
named Kris Tuttle. He has worked for many, many years at the well-
known side of Petra in Jordan. We are about done on a paper we are
about to submit. We found a large monumental structure and Petra and
is one of the largest structure that's been found there in a very long time,
we found it with satellite data. It's just hidden. You can't really see it on
the ground but the satellites the way that that that data was captured we
were able to image very well and what we did Kris and his team through a
drone over at the correct angle. They got this beautiful picture. It's crystal
clear. We're standing right below it looking up you don't… really is there
anything there? Whether it's just flying a simple quad copter oversight to
get pictures of features, whether were using for mapping or protecting
against looters is something more archaeologists are doing. It's like a
toy. In general, I don’t want to say always but, you can, more often than
not, get away with it in countries where you need special permission. It's
incredible to… I can imagine… What if you had a point cloud data
collector on a drone or what if you had a hyperspectral sensor on it that
allowed you to do chemical analyses of the soil from an aerial
perspective? I think there are so many possibilities for that with technology.
>> Anybody else? No? Well, thank you very much that was so interesting.
I hope we can work together on something
>> Yes, for sure. Thank you. [Applause]
>> Thank you everybody