Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist.
Getting permission to use a drone in Egypt was problematical.
I played varsity soccer at Yale and continued playing at Cambridge.
I already find pyramids from space. Is there anything cooler than that?
Indiana Jones is old school; we've moved on from Indy. Sorry, Harrison Ford.
Satellite imagery is the only way we can map the looting patterns effectively.
There's always a little jump to your heart when you realize you've got looting.
A picture is worth a thousand words. A satellite image is worth a million dollars.
Archaeology holds all the keys to understanding who we are and where we come from.
I'm an Egyptologist. I'm a remote sensing specialist, and I'm a space archaeologist.
I dig in the sand, and I play with pretty pictures, so I never really left kindergarten.
It's both Indiana Jones and 'National Geographic' that inspired me to be an Egyptologist.
I've always loved teaching and reading and talking to people, and my grandfather was a professor.
I am one of many people documenting damage and looting at ancient sites from space - it is such a crucial tool.
I keep being surprised by the amount of archaeological sites and features that are left to find all over the world.
A lot of people are surprised when I talk so much about the present, but politics is just a crucial part of archaeology.
That's what I want to do, ultimately: figure out a way to get the world engaged with discovery and protecting these ancient sites.
People were looting tombs 5,000 years ago in Egypt as soon as people were buried, but the problem is only getting worse and worse.
We want to excite the world about what's out there. But we don't want them to say, 'Oh, there are lots of sites in Egypt - let's loot.'
We emphasise the features on satellite maps by adding colours to farmland, urban structures, archaeological sites, vegetation and water.
The looters are using Google Earth, too. They're coming in with metal detectors and geophysical equipment. Some ask me to confirm sites.
Looting speaks to a lack of economic opportunities - frankly, we all would loot, too, if our families' continued survival depended on it.
Choosing an unconventional career path - I am not a traditional Egyptologist by any means. I found what I love, and I have stuck with it.
If you look at the Nile on a map of Egypt, you don't think it has moved very much, but the river is very violent and has moved over time.
We're literally just beginning to learn how to use satellites to find sites. More and more people are realizing there's this incredible tool.
The map we made of the 3,000-year-old city of Tanis requires no imagination. It has buildings, streets, admin complexes, houses - clear as day.
You can theorize as much as you want about what you think you're seeing, but until you get out there and dig, you can't tell exactly what it is.
WorldView-3 goes into the mid-infrared wavelength, allowing you to see very subtle geological differences on the sites at a 0.4-metre resolution.
I am part of a network of people monitoring what's happening at ancient sites in Iraq and Syria - from space. We can see clearly the destruction.
What we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow.
The majority of the research I do is archaeological research, but to me, as a professor, the most important thing is to encourage and mentor students.
Satellite datasets like WorldView can see objects as small as 1.5 feet in diameter. In 2014, WorldView-3 will be able to see objects a small as a foot.
Discoveries aren't made by one person exploring by themselves. And discoveries aren't made overnight. People don't see the thousands of hours that go into it.
When you think about archaeology, archaeology is the only field that allows us to tell the story of 99 percent of our history prior to 3,000 B.C. and writing.
We're using satellites to help map and model cultural features that could never be seen on the ground because they're obscured by modernization, forests, or soil.
We have so many thousands of sites to find across the globe and new techniques to test. The field keeps evolving with the technology, which makes things exciting.
We only have a limited amount of time left before many archaeological sites all over the world are destroyed. So we have to be really selective about where we dig.
How do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, wearing baseball mitts.
'Satellite archaeology' refers to the use of NASA and commercial high resolution satellite datasets to map and discover past structures, cities, and geological features.
I try to tell a lot of stories to make my students aware that the world is a very cool place with many problems that need solving, and that they all can help solve them.
I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past.
I'm looking at looting photos from space, and there are people putting their lives on the line every day protecting their heritage. I call these people the real culture heroes.
In archaeology, context is everything. Objects allow us to reconstruct the past. Taking artifacts from a temple or an ancient private house is like emptying out a time capsule.
I hope my work contributes to understanding long-term patterns of human behavior and how we survive, thrive, or fail during times of environmental, social, and economic crisis.
Looting and site destruction are global problems. We have a tough road ahead, and one key will be developing more collaborations and using new technologies like satellite imagery.
We can tell from the imagery a tomb was looted from a particular period of time, and we can alert INTERPOL to watch out for antiquities from that time that may be offered for sale.
I predict that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of undiscovered ancient sites across the globe. The only way to map them and locate them quickly is from satellites.
Imagery is powerful. Imagery is provocative - satellite imagery much more so because it is from space, and it allows us to get this perspective that we don't have to have otherwise.
Looting has an immense impact on our ability to understand our global cultural heritage; once these objects are gone, so too is our chance of piecing together humanity's shared story.
With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we're in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past?