And our adler members here tonight. And for those of you who would like to check out the planetarium, theres a free admission pass at our front desk, so stop by and grab one of those on the way out if you have not been. We are thrilled to be working with the adlers to present tonights program. If you dont have a book yet, you can pick one with up from our bookseller partner at seminary coop there in the back. Were here tonight to welcome sarah parcak and lucianne wall wits to talk about walkowicz. The story of the extraordinary new world of space archaeology is a story of how we see ourselves. Through spy photographs and satellite imagery, we can look thousands of years into our history and discover what would otherwise be completely invisible to us. Sarah has worked on five continents and over 20 years of experience in the anthropology field including as a National Geographic explorer. Her work has been the subject of three bb specials, and she was a 2014 senior ted fellow and winner of the 2016 ted prize. Shes joined by lucianne at the add orler planetary Adler Planetarium in chicago. How stars influence a planets suitability as a host for alien life. Shes also an artist and works in a variety of media from oil paint to sound. Welcome to both of you. [applause] hey, everybody, thanks for coming. [laughter] so sarah and i have known each other for several years, so it was like a really wonderful supply when we were, like, will you talk to this, like, space archaeologist person, i was, like, how long do you have . [laughter] so, you know, i guess we had talked a little bit back stage, and i kind of wanted to kick off just by talking first of all, congratulate sarah on her book, please. [applause] thank you. Has anyone here read it so far . I see at least one copy tucked into the thing. All right. I have partially read it. In the interest of full disclosure with. [laughter] but i wanted to hear a little bit about how the book came around because, you know, being here in the American Writer withs museum, i thought it would be fun to talk not only about space and archaeology, but also just about writing. Yes. So it all started in 2016 shortly after i won the ted prize, and my tv agent had been poking me for a while and saying, you know, you should really write a book. And i know authors, and i said, yeah, i know better than to write a book. Despite what where am i going to find the time . Ive got, you know, a young child, im trying to kick off this big platform, i really need to think about writing a book. Its time. And i think id written an academic book, and to me, that seemed much easier than writing a book for the general public. I can give an hour talk, i can give lectures. The idea of writing something that was in the range of 80,000 words that people would actually want to realize, i joked that if you are having trouble sleeping at night, you should buy by textbook and realize the first two pages of the third chapterrer, and if youre not asleep, you must be a specialist. So i think in the process of thinking about the book proposal and thinking through all the books that were out there for the general public about archaeology, first of all, there really arent popular books about archaeology by women. And i think in academia right now were having a bit of a moment for women, for people of color, the idea of making the field more diverse, making space open for other people. And to me, thats incredibly important. So the idea that i could write something and show people not only can you do it, but its necessary, and we need to provide these opportunities for other people, that became important. And were natural storytellers. The joke in archaeology is one stone is a stone, two stones are our future, and three stones make a wall. If you find four stones together, you probably found a temple. So the idea that were weaving all this evidence together, that became really important for me, for me to do. So thats really what drove me to write this. Its funny that you mention that, because i think that this is something that people dont realize about science, like physical sciences as well, that, you know, like, one data point is, you know, a potentially interesting discovery. Two is a line with no error bars. Three is definitely a line and four is, like, totally a trend in the universe. [laughter] so theres a certain element of storytelling, i think, that comes with it as well. It might be helpful im not totally sure that everybody is familiar with what exactly is different about the archaeology that you do and what a space archaeologist actually, it might be helpful to give a quick recap of that. Sure. So in archaeology, of course, we spend a lot of our time looking for things, and were assisted by a lot of tools on the ground to help us see beneath the ground to figure out where walls are buried. But when were dealing with mass land scapes, prior to Aerial Photography and satellites, it was really hard to figure out where things were. Its the use of different kinds of satellite sensors and airbased sensors to map and model ancient landscapes. Think of it almost like a spacebased cat scan system where you have buried features, sometimes things like pyramids, sometimes things like houses. And the stones and materials that are under the ground affect the overlaying vegetation and soils in very subtle ways that we cant see with our naked human eye. But the satellites recording the earth or record all this information and different parts of the light spectrum that we cant see, and all of a sudden theres popouts in the landscape. And instead of maybe being able to map for survey 10 or 15 sites over the course of a season, we know exactly where to go, and we can find hundreds, if not thousands of sites very, very quickly. But in archaeology its not about the finding, its about the finding out. So what we do is we can its science. Its hypothesisdriven research. How and why did civilizations rise or collapse, how or why did this city grow in importance and then all of a sudden wasnt important, and maybe its because a river changed course, and all of a sudden that city lost main transportation routes. So these are the kinds of things we can look for using satellite imagery where we know exactly where to go. So talk to me a little bit about, like, what your actual data looks like. So this is, essentially, like digital the photography in the same way that, you know, i think in astronomy people often have that picture which, you know, if you come to the adler, youll see a whole bunch of telescopes including those that look exactly what you think they look like. But nowadays telescopes well, small ones look like that, but the telescopes that professional astronomers use, my job looks like me in front of a laptop. People want to interview me, are you doing anything cool . Yes, but it just looks like me in front of a laptop. [laughter] fundamentally, thats me too. [laughter] yeah, its not well, to me its really exciting because, like most scientists, we spend our time in long Conference Calls and writing graphs and writing reports, and anytime i do science its really exciting. But it doesnt look exciting. But in archaeology we go from the known to the unknown. So we never i tell people, some people seem to think ive got like a magical harry potter wand, and the ghostly outlines of a city just appear and its there in 3d, is and maybe that goes on in my head, but that is absolutely not how the science happens. So what we do if were looking at a particular landscape, say egypt, and were working in an area with lots of pyramids and lots of tombs from over 2,000 years, we develop databases of all the known archaeological sites and features in that area, wherever in the world were working. And then we start look at the landscapes and the geology, is there sand, any kind of elevation, is it hilly, what are the sizes of features that are there, what types, pyramids, tombs, settlements, and we start looking at all the pictures of everything thats there. And this is before we even order the satellite imagery are. Because youve got to know what youre looking at, you have to know if theres any meant of anything any hint of anything beneath the ground. I should say im pretty honest in the book about times when i was wrong. Its good to be honest about science. Science is a long process of iteration and repeating and hoping you get something right, 1 out of 1,000 times if youre lucky. And so when youre processing the imagery, its in phases. So youre doing work, and youre teasing out information, youre teasing out information very slowly with different kinds of algorithms, and finally you might see the hint of an outline of a shape, and you focus on that area. And when you find manager that works in one part of the image, you extrapolate. This is a super collaborative project. Im Never Working by myself, im always collaborating with my friends and colleagues in egypt or in iceland or in cotland, and scotland, and were constantly sharing information. Theres never a hero archaeologist, its im always part of a team. Give or take an Indiana Jonesesque leather jacket. [laughter] guilty as charged. Your honor. So this is the part that im very jealous of, is that you actually get to go to the place that the thing youre looking at is and check it out, which is really, like, not an option not yet. For the most part. [laughter] so i guess id like to know a little bit about the process of that. You know, you to all of this recon on the images that you have. You actually order new data, so new satellite images to be taken. At what point do you actually get to go there, or, like, are there places that you get to go . If when do you find out if youre wrong . [laughter] so usually what we do by the sort of collaborative process and if im working with my team at an Organization Called global explorer, well all look at imagery, well all crosscheck each other and maybe come up with a top ten list of interesting things we think look like features that are known or excavated already, and well send those to specialists. And lets just say its in a place like scotland. So we send them off to specialists in the viking period, and theyll write us back and say, you know, features 1, 8 and 10 look amazing. I do not know what you were spoken when you were looking at 2 and 3, but nothings there. I think these three things are definitely worth checking out, and honestly, id go with 8. That looks the best to us. So we rely very heavily on the specialists. Obviously, im an egypttologist, but in other parts of the world i do rely on other experts. Sometimes it can be pretty quick if were already collaborating when we know were going to a particular place in the next month or six months, then well go. In egypt the permitting process is a little different. Ive been working at a 3,800yearold site, so we started a funding process about six months before our season begins. I work with the very kind permission of the egyptian government, and they have very, very strict rules and regulations around that process, and we have to tell them exactly where were going. But im very lucky, im very fortunate, i get to ive gotten to travel all over the world. Were wrapping up a project in peru, were about to go to i would ya. So i joke with people india. I joke with people i dream of doing projects in fiji in the middle of the winter. You will encounter no sympathy for getting away from alabama in the winter in chicago. [laughter] i figured i wouldnt. So talk a little bit about global explorer, right . This was the platform that you set up after the ted prize. Yeah. So one of the Big Questions we have in archaeology is, first, how many archaeological sites are out there left to find and also how do you think how can we create sort of a more equitable world for aspiration. And exploration. And right now to specialize the Remote Sensing to be able to access the data theres only maybe now a thousand, a couple hunker i dont know exactly hundred, i dont know exactly how many people specialize in exactly what i do. But i decided to set up global explorer which is a citizens platform that allows anyone in the world to look at satellite imagery and help find ancient sites because there are only so many of us, and most governments around the world dont have databases of archaeological sites. You can ask a biologist how many species of this kind of frog are there, 387, and theyll be able to tell you where they are. If you ask any archaeologist how many archaeological sites are around the world, not a single one would be able to answer that question, which is ridiculous because theyre mostly pretty big. The idea is you create a platform, and you allow everyone to work, and youre able to work much, much faster and more efficiently. Most of the time when im looking at imagery, im looking and looking and looking and not finding anything. So with global explorer, today i think weve had almost 90,000 users from 120 country, and theyve found over 20,000 archaeological features in peru, and about 700 of them have been determined by experts to be major sites. Thats amazing. So this is an example of something, have people herald the term heard the term Citizen Science before . I see some nods. Thats kind of the phrase for all of this exno ration of, you know exploration of what would otherwise be technically data that has been, generally speaking, historically inaccessible to people who dont have Technical Training whether its in archaeology or astronomy. So one of the things that we do at the adler is were part of the developers for something called universe. So this was a project that started at something called galaxy zoo back just about a decade or more now where there were these collections of galaxies, billions of stars in space, and people were interested in exploring them but, you know, its a big task to take all of these images and go through and tag them, label them as to what kind of galaxy they are. And so this Online Platforms universe started as a way of exploring those images much in the same way that youre describing with global explorer. And one of the things that i think has been really interesting about that, you know, nowadays the universe hosts, like, tons and tons of different stuff. I dont think we have archaeology specifically, but we have like, for example, a project called old weather where you look at ship logs and read that or snapshot serengeti where you look at animals and count the number of penguins in this image in addition to i work on a mission called kepler where we look for planets around other stars. And, you know, people who are not astronomers who dont, generally speaking, have the ability to write a program the way that i would if i was interacting with the data have done things like find new planets around other stars that werent discovered by people with professional astronomy training. And i think its really amazing to see this exploration really democratized in that way. Yeah, i think archaeology for some people is hard and that, first of all, it can be expensive to get to other places. It is an incredibly intense field, if you are not ablebodied and able to go out specifically, it can be really hard. And especially since having a child, i see were all naturally born explorers, and the big question when we launched is can we truly democratize archaeology. We didnt want to just create something just fun for kids. We wanted to create something that would work, that archaeologists could use that would generate important data andal allow people to do the science that i and my colleagues do. So design played a really Important Role in creating the platform before we Began Development we spent about six months speaking to people like the people behind universe and other Citizen Science platforms. We spent a lot of time talking to people of all ages and backgrounds about the types of things that they wanted to see in a platform like this. And weve had users as young as 4 and 5, and weve had kids as old as in their 90s and older. So the idea that weve developed something for everyone that people feel really connected to is really important to me. But also weve now, because were redeveloping the platform for a new launch which we hope will be some point early next year, weve gotten feedback from hundreds of people ant things they didnt about things they didnt like and things they did like and developing it and making a better experience for everyone. Have there been examples in your field of people calling stuff that the socalled experts have missed . So theres one instance, to me its kind of one of my favorite cases of global explorer. So our platform focused on an area of peru which is really famous for these things, some of you may have heard of [inaudible] say cred monkeys and birds and sake red monkeys and birds and butterflies that the people carved into the landscape. Its kind of debated as to what their purpose was. If we dont know what it is, we say it was for ritual purposes. [laughter] clearly very important and symbolic to the people. So our citizenscientists found many, many dozens of new potential sites in the region, and then we shared them with my dear friend Louis Costello whos just been named the minister the of culture in peru. Were very excited about that. He then took the data and went out and was doing drone mapping, and he as a side sort of result of hooping these new mapping these new sites ended up finding 15 new ones. Is so the idea that this data can be taken and given and help empower local archaeologists, to me, its just an extension of citizen archaeology. Ultimately, were giving the people on the ground in the places that know best the tools and resources that they might not otherwise have access to. Yeah, i think this is something that, you know, you mentioned in the beginning that were kind of seeing this moment in academia which i think is happening to some extent everywhere, a kind of leveling of the Playing Field of space being made for people who have been excluded traditionally from some of these practices. And its really been encouraging for me to see the emphasis on collaboration that exists in, i think, both of our fields where this myth of the lone genius that, you know, like, if you look at einstein or let me pick a fictional character, so doc brown from back to future. Thats often who people picture when they picture, you know, an astronomer, a scientist, and they also picture Indiana Jones, you know, when they think about archaeology. So i think its been really gratifying to me to see the way the teamwork is becoming more part of the narrative, because thats really actually how it is, you know . Even in any of these like, socalled famous lone geniuses that are from history had a body of colleagues that they were talking to, you know . I often get asked, you know, whats it like in the field . Again, people think ive got a harry potter wand and the magic just happens. The reality is im a combination hotel manager, ceo, diplomat, food planner and nurse. It is my job to make sure that my team, which is composed of about a hundred egyptians and foreigners, are able to do their jobs really, really well. I run a joint mission with egypts ministry of antiquities which means i have equal numbers of egyptian and foreign team participants, i have an egyptian codirector, i have a staff i work with, probably about 6070 local workmen. And to me, the workman thats throwing up the bucket with sand is every bit as important as the senior professor, specialist whos written a hundred articles on a particular subject. Everyone plays a crucial role, and archaeologists havent done as good of a job celebrating the work force. Frankly, we couldnt do it without them. And in my job all day long, i tell people i go around and make sure that my team has coffee and snacks, i make sure that when the Ceramics Team has run out of glue i know so that they can get glue, and then they do their jobs really well. At the end of the day, im responsible for my teams health and safety and wellbeing, both the egyptian and foreign work forces, and im responsible to the u. S. Government who has helped to fund my projects. So its my job to keep things moving. My husband, who is also an archaeologist, he used to run projects and now i do, and my job is also to make sure that he is happy excavating, because for years and years he had the hat that i wear now, and i appreciate it so much more. Its really, really hard work, and its not usually fun or glamorous. But at the end of the day, you know, every now and then i get to stick my trowel in the ground and remember what it was like before i was responsible, and thats a good reminder. My version is sticking my program in the data myself. I get to, write, like a couple lines of code, and im like [laughter] people dont realize that Indiana Jones hat says procurer of coffee and snacks on the back of it. It does. One of the things i think is so interesting about this kind of movement to equalize, democratize access to the stuff is were often, i think, caught up in the terrible things that the internet has brought into our lives, but it really is something that i think wouldnt have been possible without the internet. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the history of Remote Sensing, because once upon a time it was film, right . Canisters of film. Thats right. The field starts over a hundred years ago. So the first Remote Sensing a happened in 1908 around stonehenge. A british lieutenant put a camera on a tethered balloon and took pictures around stonehenge, and what he noticed was staining in the field. And archaeologists looked at that, wait a minute, those could be, like, buried features. So over time the field developed, of course, with world war i and people taking pictures, archaeologists served in the nascent royal air force, and they went out with their hobby cameras to take pictures of archaeological sites across the middle east and showed them to their captains. And they went, wait a minute, you can take pictures of things from airplanes . [laughter] we could use this to spy on the bad guys or the people they said were the bad guys. So its ironic that archaeology actually started the field of aerial reconnaissance in the military, and that kind of flipped around. So one of the main data sets that we use now is something called corona High Resolution spy photography from the 1960s. This is photography that was taken between the u. S. And russia in the cold war. And its important to us because it preserves landscapes that are no longer, no longer around. Finish so a lot of archaeologists are using that data, of course, in addition to satellites. Yeah. I think i mentioned this to you, i have a historical correction to cocorona. We both have familial connections that actually brought us into doing what we do. So, you know, i often think its ironic when people talk about, like, the new era of, like, private industry going into space, Companies Like blue origin and spacex and all of these other things, because the history of observations from space which was actually, like, satellite reconnaissance with corona was private companies. So the very first satellites that were put into space, actually, to observe the earth that brought back these images were in part developed by e a Company Called itech. And my father was in the air force, and my father had me when he was a lot older, for anyone who was doing the math, he was 59 when i was born. So he was actually in the air force during the cold war and doing a lot of the intelligence work and had actually transitioned into private industry and was the only person on, working in the Rockefeller Center fund who had security clearance to know that itechs main contractor was the cia developing the corona satellites. [laughter] which is, like, kind of how that whole thing got started. And so we have this, like, long history both ill mention this also comes into astronomy as observing the earth from space that very much started with military intelligence surveillance. And even today, you know, lets see, this was maybe back in 2012 or 2013. Astronomy got a call where we suddenly were told, word made its way around that there were two new tell p cops that just telescopes that we could have from the National Reconnaissance office if we wanted. [laughter] so there are missions being planned right now where if you retrofit something that was meant to look down at earth, you can look out at space. And thats a mission ill probably launch in the next several years. But theres this longstanding overlap of satellite observations of earth and our observations of space as well. Getting back to this connection, my grandfather was one of the pioneerses of using Aerial Photography in forestry. And while we kind of take that for granted because were all Walking Around with google earth in our pockets, essentially, he was in the screaming eagles in world war ii of course, we just celebrated the 75th anniversary of the jump by the paratroopers and he got the state of the Art Technology at the time which was a little foldout black and white contour map which he kept in his pocket so when he landed 75 years a ago, he could unfold it and use it to read the land scape to meet up with he was a captain. He took this knowledge with him to graduate school and using this new Cutting Edge Technology to map trees and tree heights. And i sort of found his articles from the 1950s, thanks to miracle of the internet. He talks about what will we find when we can see in infrared. And its amazing because almost word for word i sort of must have been channeling him when i wrote some of my early academic papers, because theyre very similar to each other. So is infrared light used in mapping the work that you do . Or is it mostly physical light . Its essentially heat vision, so its the red, low energy part of the spectrum of light a little outside of where your eyes are sensitive to. Youve probably seen heat vision in, you know, like, movies. But is it also used . Near, middle and far are the work that i do. If you remember not this summer, but the summer before, there was a big drought in the u. K. , and there were many, many articles that came out showing all these outlines of medieval churches and bronze age forts that just showed up in the landscape. And this is because when vegetation is growing on top of, say, a stone structure, right . Its roots are going to be stunted. Its not going to be able to go as deep. And maybe its visibly we cant see that that grass is a little bit less healthy, but in the Near Infrared which is where we see chlorophyll, you see it, its just a little bit less healthy. Its one thing to just see a blob, but its another thing to see an outline of an entire building. And thats what we often will see when were processing imagery using different parts of the light spectrum. It may not be a wall in england, it may be a mud brick wall thats buried in egypt, and we can see the differences in the silty soil in, say, the middle infrared which is really good for looking at differences in geology. In some cases the actual heat of the site is hotter or colder than the area around it, so we use the satellite imagely to find those differences. We use different technologies depending on what the structures were made from. Yeah, we do the same thing in space. We use the full complement, all the energies of light to be able to look out specifically, actually, the infrared is really important for us for studying things that are shrouded in dust and also for looking very far back in time. Because the expansion of the universe shifts all of that light that would be an invisible portion for our eyes if it was close to us far into the red. And the further back or the more we can look into the universe and also the further into the red we can look, we end up getting to see further back in time because it takes a while for that light to come to us. I also, just to bring it back to the cold war for a second, i recently was reading a book about the history of area 51 which is, you know, where a lot of, like, Spy Technology was developed, a lot of the advanced, like, aeronautical engineering was done. And i read this really great anecdote that because a lot of reconnaissance was done in the infrared when they were board, in down time, they would sometimes construct weird shapes on the exposed runways and run heaters or machines really hot so that, you know, soviet flyovers would be, like, whats that . [laughter] i think its really funny. Yeah. Ive heard, because theres a particular kind of High Resolution photograph thats taken every time at the exact same time or every day at the exact same time so you can actually, if you get a notification from a Satellite Company that the satellite is going to take a picture in a particular place at a particular time, you can, like, all line out or spell something. Ive heard of that being done before. Most of the time, people behave [laughter] but sometimes they dont. So what do you think of some of the Small Satellite Companies that are out there now, some of the efforts to, you know, take additional surveillance of the planet and study it that way . Does that have any overlap with your work, or do you use that data. So theres always a tradeoff in the work that i do. So its resolution versus the temporal nature of the imagery. First of all, its not just like i can take get a satellite, a High Resolution image of a place like egypt, iceland or india, wherever were working, and the image is going to work. Satellite imagery works very differently in different types of the year because of thing like weather. Wet season versus dry season. Ive had the outlines of entire geological sites show up in january and then in august i can throw the entire remotesensing kitchen sink at the site, and i cant see a thing, and its all because of the weather and the way that the ground acts in relationship to groundwater moisture. So, and then, of course, when im mapping things like archaeological site routeing, if im looking for progression over time, then the temporal nature becomes much more important because im looking for is the site being rooted over, of course, weeks or months, and the High Resolution imagery may image the site, but i may not see the progression of rooting. So for us, well use any and all data we can. The great thing about a lot of these Small Companies is that the imagery, for us, is free. The ceos are super collaborative and want their data to be used, and the idea that we can use it anywhere in the world, theres tons of Data Available is just, of course, there are tradeoffs to privacy. You know, i joke with my students that it wont be too long from now, and theyre going to have to shut their shades because satellites can see through windows, and what happens when the resolution is good enough so that we can begin picking out individual people. What does that do to us, what does that mean. Yeah. This is a huge question, you know, the funny thing about astronomy is that astronomers because were constantly looking out and, you know, a lot of our decisions about, like, projects that we undertake or, you know, like science questions we decide to pursue, for many we have not really impacted peoples lives directly that often. So, you know, were not working, for example, on human subjects where theres a whole lot of ethical training that goes into it. However, one of the things and i think this is true in your field as well as image processing, this, like, you know, ability to look at images with computer algorithms and maybe draw out things that you wouldnt have been able to by eye has become more and more important in astronomy. A lot of us work on machinelearning algorithms which are, essentially, advanced programs that can draw out information from data. Whether its images or other kinds of astronomical data, and, you know, draw out trends. Be able to do recognition of, like, galaxies in an automated way that are very closely related to things like facial recognition, you know, the ability to surveil things from space and then space or aircraft and that those algorithms that we develop and perfect on images that dont impact human lives are often then portable out into arenas where they might be. So theres a big movement at least in my field for astronomers to engage with data ethics and with the ethics of developing these tools much more directly. Especially because, you know, like, theres just not that many jobs in astronomy, so a lot of students like graduate student that learn these kinds of techniques then actually end up back out in industry where you hope that before they get there, theyve thought about some of the ethical implications of the things that they do. Yeah. Certainly in archaeology as well. So were developing the platform for india. And one of the big i would say complaints because, you know, were learning too with the platform, but one of the big sort of repenttive comments repetitive comments is we look at these images and we dont find anything. Welcome to my world, this is science. I wish it was more exciting. But the idea being, you know, we can use machine learning, and we can train the machine to get rid of, say, the bad imagery. So the cloud cover, the areas where theres dense vegetation, areas where there are large, blank fields. And then training the machine with hundreds and hundreds of known archaeological site types, the machine can then prioritize the imagery. So then the crowd has been saying to the machine, hey, these are actually things, and the machine gets better and better. But what happens when the machine gets really, really good at doing this and have we just invented skynet . And i keep expecting the terminator to show up and, like, destroy my computer. Anyway, this is what happens when you let your imagination running away working for hours and hours. I think about these things all the time and, like, our colleagues talk about them. Whats the tradeoff, what are we doing . Is this really the right way to be doing science . Yeah. Well, and, you know, the thing that i often come back to is that even if the work that i am doing doesnt directly impact people, the fact that, you know, working at the adler hike a big part of like, a big part of what i do is communicating about science science. And the fact that i use some of those algorithms that are out of the box play toys compared to skynet, but the fact that i use those and understand how they work and what theyre capable of means when we see this stuff deployed on social media, for example, i dont know if people saw that theres a huge well, there probably will be shortly a huge Class Action Lawsuit against facebook for using facial recognition in the state of illinois, that they had been they just lost a case where they were arguing that individuals would have to press charges for use of facial recognition on their images, which is how facebook and other sites like that a tag you or your friends. So every time you hit yes, thats me, youre helping them get better at that. Anytime you, for example, did anyone use the make my face look older thing . Okay, good. [laughter] neither did i. If you did and you dont want to raise your hand, thats okay too. I tricked it. I did a picture of myself, and then i used an egyptian mummy. [laughter] im evil in subversive in ways that i know how to be. [laughter] take that, training set. [laughter] yeah, so anytime, you know, like these things seem like super fun and its like, oh, what would i look like a hundred years from now, an egyptian mummy. But all of those are, essentially, helping companies or developers, whoever it a happens to be who youre giving your image to train those algorithms to do whatever. You dont know. Thats kind of the problem, you dont actually know. Yeah. I make sure whenever im teaching my Remote Sensing class in the fall, and its really important to me to do a whole class on ethics. Is so what happens when, say,ing i dont know, theres a really contentious divorce case and High Resolution satellite imagery shows that a car with the exact same make and model and color of one partner is parked out in front of the address that happens to be the address of someone with whom you think your partner is having an affair with, and then theres proof. Is that coincidence . And how can this be used in bad ways as well. And were getting, the imagerys Getting Better and better and better. And so, you know, were not that far off from spacebased individual recognition and what happens when that happens. I dont know. I dont have the answers because theres equal light and darkness. Yeah. What should we talk about now . [laughter] i know you wanted to talk a little bit about kind of history and, you know, this movement to maybe write some of both of our practices right historical wrongs. I know your book talks about the history of looting and i think its interesting to hear about the work that youve done to right some of those wrongs in the present day and also archaeologys participation in what was, essentially, looting historically speaking. Yeah. I think, you know, i have to acknowledge complex and uncomfortable things. And archaeology and anthropology has pretty serious racist backgrounds and histories, and this new generation of scientists and scholars, were beginning to unravel and unpack and talk about how do we, you know, how do we create more justice and more equity and more diversity in the fields. And i, you know, im very sensitive to these issues as a white woman living in the u. S. So i try to make as much space as possible for especially my egyptian colleagues and collaborators. Something thats been very important to us as weve gone into india because, of course, theres a pretty serious colonialist history there, we recognize that were a Company Based in the u. S. , and we do archaeological work, and the last thing we wanted to do was go in and tell our colleagues what they should be doing. That is not okay on so many levels. So instead before we even made the decision to go there, i had a number of meetings with colleagues, and i said, hey, you know, this is what we do, heres the menu. What interests you . What are your needs . What are your priorities . What would you even be interested in the possibility of a collaboration, and they were very excited, and they said we want capacity building, we need large scale countrywide mapping because we need to do assessments, and we want you to engage with the Younger Generation of archaeologists to provide them this training. So thats what were doing. Were collaborating with indian developers, and were specifically providing needs for them. So were trying. Its going to take time, but i think in talking about new ways of thinking, and i think these are much better ways of thinking, hopefully the dialogue will change. Its just going to take a lot of time. Yeah. I think and this is something that has come up in our field as well, you know, the history of astronomy were often talking, oh, weve gone out and explored and discovered, and theres a lot of washing over the fact that a lot of those sort of what we would call early missions, the voyagings out to various parts of the world to do observation, for example, like venus. Historically they were really not just about scientific exploration, they were about resource acquisition and scientists catching rides on voyages whose missions were ultimately colonialist. And were seeing the legacy of that right now with some of the controversy over the construction of a new telescope called the tmt which some of you might have seen in the news. But historically, this is one piece in a much larger history of hawaiian resistance, native hawaiian resistance in what is now the state of hawaii but was once the kingdom of hawaii. And theres what i would say is a pretty significant risk in the field between astronomers who kind of want to do business as usual and want to say, well, you know, its okay because weve created an Education Program for you, and its not really in the spirit of what youre talking about which is what does the community actually want and need. And sometimes the answer is we want our mountain back and, you know, as astronomers we kind of have to learn to be okay with that because weve gotten what we wanted for a very long time over other peoples wishes. But its a really pretty heated debate going on for us as well. And i think were seeing these debates and discussions definitely bleed into very mainstream pop culture. So how many people here saw black panther . A lot of you. Theres that iconic scene where the killmonger is in front of, you know, the case of objects that were stolen from wakanda, and like, welcome to every museum thats in europe or the u. S. They are full of stolen objects. And, yes, some of them were acquired legally, but that doesnt mean they were acquired ethically. Theres a big difference. Because they were given under colonial time periods, i think we have to ask a lot of really difficult and uncomfortable questions. I think we need to be listening a lot more to the Indigenous Peoples whose objects were taken. And now were seeing this push to repatriate. Were seeing this push to give back. There have been a lot of discussions now as well of relationship to settlers and, of course, theyve profited and made a lot of money off the opioid epidemic, and yet theyve funded so many museums. Now museums in edge land have removed their name. Who owns the past and who has the right to display and take and share and show. And i think were going to have a lot more talking to do before we begin to unravel the mess. And a lot more listening. Mostly listening. It looks like were at q a . [laughter] yes. If youd like to ask a question, if anyone would like, just raise your hand and please wait for the microphone. Are you planning to use any of the radar satellites that are coming online . Thats a good question. So radar sat, radar sat 2 are fantastic data sets. Theyre really important for the work i do in mainly desert areas just because the radar allows us to see through very dense layers of sand and overburden. So a lot of the work that i do out in the desert, were looking at mapping landscapes and river courses. And so the idea that we can map old courses of, say, the nile river in the Western Desert of egypt and use that to help map sites from 10,000 years ago or more, its really important. So, yeah, thats a very valuable data set for the work i do. I would think the government is very interested in, for maybe defense or other purposes, understanding and analyzing the data youre collecting. Do you have a relationship with them on some things you share with them and some things you dont feel appropriate to share. Yes. So ive worked with the u. S. State department. So the state department has something called the Cultural Property advisory committee, and theyre a 12person advisory body, and they make recommendations to the state department for cultures that may be undergoing conflict to create new policies to import the restriction of antiquities. So i worked with them in 2014 obviously with the rise in looting in egypt, i was able to testify and share the satellite imagery analysis my team and i had done, because you have to prove a series of points that there is looting, there is damage, there is threat and there are, indeed, antiquities that people are finding. So that data, mission to a number of data that my colleagues presented, was used in lets say it was december of 2016, a memorandum was signed to restrict antiquities from being imimportanted into the. And there are imported. And there are similar ones on iraq and syria. In those cases, of course, im very happy to share that information with the government. I also work with homeland security. Unless anyone says anything, this is specifically for antiquities, they do very good work in terms of stopping antiquities from being illegally imported into the u. S. Anytime theres a case from antiquities involved in the middle east, im contacted and asked to provide commentary in connection with the satellite imagery that i have, and im very happy to do that. Did you, your company or a former student have anything to do with the discovery of the city in honduras . And just as an aside, its interesting when they were displaying artifacts who shows up, but the corrupt president to get into the photo ops. Right. So i think, i think youre referring to the, quoteunquote, lost city of the monkey god. That was a best selling book written by a gentleman named douglas preston. And that book was kind of panned by my archaeological colleagues. It was, the whole myth of the lost city is very colonialist. So, first of all, Indigenous Peoples never lose their sites ever, anywhere. They know where they are, they know their significance, they know their history and, actually, many Indigenous People go on to get ph. D. S and write about their cultures, and theyre the most knowledgeable about them. So that book completely glossed over the indigenous knowledge that was there. And i think the shame of that particular story is the idea of this quest for this mythical lost city which never existed, except in white settlers minds. The idea that theres this amazing, diverse landscape full of hundreds and hundreds of sites that are covered over by modern vegetation, thats the story all over the world. And i just wish that that had done a better job of bringing that story to light. Several of my colleagues have done really, really good science in that region, and i think the story of Central American archaeology, the archaeology of the maya, were just seeing it come to light because of something called light detection and ranging. Its a Laser Technology thats flown on an airplane or helicopter, and what it does is it sends down millions of pulse beams of light, and it creates a point cloud model, and it allows you to take away the overlaying vegetation, and youre left with a very detailed top to graphic topographic map. So my colleagues have used it across central america. And the idea that we can for the first time get a comprehensive map of the entire geology of the maya world is amazing. The idea that there are these lost places, yes, in some cases there are cities, there are places beneath the rain forest that we dont know about, but i think it also shows we have a lot more to learn from Indigenous Peoples because they still value these places, and theyre still really important to them. Its worth looking at because you mentioned what canada earlier wakanda earlier, this idea that existed for many years that there was a city that a had, like, a christian king, and the place that people imagined presser john is a kind of precursor to what con do, even actually appears in some of the earlier Marvel Comics just before black panther does. And it was this idea that there was this very advanced, technological lost city that had been located. People thought it was in india, then people thought it was ethiopia and eventually, you know, some wouldbe explorers showed up, and they were very confused there to learn that the king was, like, i am not named presser john. [laughter] but its worth looking up, similar idea. Yeah. My daughter and i were wondering about opportunities especially in the future for archaeologists and astronomers working together, in particular as space travel becomes more accessible . Like when she grows up . Thats a great question. You know, i one of the things that i say, i disagree with in terms of nasas policies on right now you need a d. S. To be an astronomer, and we in archaeology get b. A. S, and as much as the people at nasa know about geology and stars and science, the idea of reconstructing a a whole civilization from scratch, were really, really, really good at that. So what was maybe difficult to do and, obviously, we wont know fig not if, but when we find other civilizations on other worlds, theres a whole structure to how you recreate a civilization, and theres a pretty good chance that if we do find one on another planet, there wont be living beings there anymore. So, yes, anyone from nasas listening, i volunteer to do it. I really would love to begin having dialogues with people like elon musk and richard branson, because i think we have to start planning now for that inevitable pointing in time. And i know luciannes done Pretty Amazing work creating base and beginning to deconstruct these colonialist terminologies and thinking through new ways of describing voyages and journeying. Ill let you talk about that, but i yeah. Of its, we need, we need a whole new vocabulary for how were going to do this. Yeah. I think there are a lot of really exciting possibilities especially because, you know, i think in some ways privatebased industry like the elon musks and jeff bezoss of the world get too much credit for making it more accessible. You know, its still not accessible if you have to sell your house to go to space. But one of the opportunities that is there is that there are more people now, i think, having dialogue from different sections of study and expertise. So, for example, people who are interested in taking the tools of archaeology and anthropology to understand not only, like, you know, what happens if we find signs of life on another world or even a civilization, you know, something that builds things in the way that humans do on another world, you know, not just that, but also even understanding how we might go about searching for life. And i think that that has been very much the purview of people with a very, very narrow range of expertise mostly in, you know, physics and occasionally schedule industry and biology been chemistry and biology. Is so one of the things ive been very excited to see is how much space there is now for conversations with people in the humanities as well as sciences beyond the physical sciences. So, you know, i think that thats something that will be very important as we go forward. Especially not just making the conversation broader, but also understanding the mistakes that weve made in the past and how we can go forward better together. And i just want to add one thing, sort of advice that really helped me, and i cant quite see how young your daughter is. Whats that . Okay. So im a huge, like, nerd. I have found the single thing that has helped me to be a better imaginer of what what the different possibilities of people existing in the past is all the Science Fiction that ive read. Whether its butler or guinn and now, of course, i just named all women, and i did that intentionally. But i have a whole chapter in my book where i its all about Science Fiction and what archaeologys going to be like in a hundred years, and i did that on purpose because ive always wanted to write Science Fiction. But the idea that why are we reexploring sites on earth in a hundred years, its not what you think, and i dont want to ruin it for you if you havent read it yet. But, yeah, im very excite for your daughters generation because i think there are so many walls that are coming down between fields, things are becoming so much more interdisciplinary, but definitely start reading lots and lots of Science Fiction. No matter what she ends up doing, it will help her. Great recommendation. Thank you both so much. I just, two points that came up in the conversation was the power of Citizen Science and also the impact of looting. And im curious about if youre seeing the opportunity for this Citizen Science, the democratization of information fueling looting or, conversely, helping more local folks to do archaeology in their own backyards. So that question gets asked often, and so that played a really Important Role in the design of the platform. So if you go into global explorer, you see a satellite image, but theres no mapping information. All you know is youre somewhere in peru, thats it. And if you, if you, say, look at google, maybe it takes you five years to find the exact place that youre looking at on the global earth platform in google everett. Its really, really hard to find any connection between them. The idea that maybe, you know, are we training looters, i would hope not. You know, the reality is one of my e colleagues i think it was, gosh, almost 40 years ago, said if we dont start using satellite imagery to map looting, the pot hunters are going to beat us to it, and the reality is they have. There are so many sites around the world that have been haley looted whether its in india, china, egypt or even, you know, in the american southwest. So we have a lot of work to do. We need to work faster and harder, and we need to think carefully about the ethics of what were doing. For example, the only people that ever get the maps are archaeologists or specialists of that region and, obviously, there are always challenges. Data can be lost, you can do screen shots. We do the best thing we can with data storage. In the documentation. There are not enough archaeologists in the world that we can aboard archaeology but in the hands of local people and make them the culture heroes. Its very powerful to me and thats something that we want to do. Certainly, a number of people i work with and sites, that does not make them about people, the people are the western people to drive the market. They are making a little extra money to pay for an operation that theyll do the same thing. I thickly have to think through the many shades of gray and how and what and where were doing to engage with communities. But why are they eluding. To say that is all the time that we have for tonight. She will be around the front of the museum and if you do not have a book you can purchase one in the back. I liked to think our friends at the planetarium for copresenting a noise like to think both of you for a wonderful evening. [applause] [inaudible conversations] booktv continues on cspan2. Television for serious readers. [inaudible conversations] thank you all for coming. Im christina and ill do a brief introduction. All of the books for tonights event at the front register and signing will take place in the back so if you can form a line back here and around the corner to the back