THE GUNK SPACE ARCHAEOLOGISTS HOW TO
THE GUNK SPACE ARCHAEOLOGISTS PROFESSIONAL

The drill bit broke through into the chamber at a depth of 63 inches, a stainless steel tube was lowered through the airlock to take samples of the chamber air at several levels. Bob Mooresfrom Black & Decker Corporation tailored a new drill to the Giza exploration. Still needed was a drill to cut through the limestone cap without using lubricants or cooling fluids that might contaminate the chamber, and an airlock that would admit the drill shaft and photo equipment but not the air. The NGS photographic division modified and tested a remotely controlled video system and a 35-millimeter camera, and developed a lighting system that would not elevate the chamber temperature. The initial contact led to a two year project which he organized and headed a team, co-sponsored by EAO and the National Geographic Society (NGS), to apply space technology in an effort to examine and photograph the Giza Chamber.

He felt it could by applying space technology to the task. Farouk El-Baz whether it would be possible to examine and sample the second chamber of the subterranean chamber carved in the bedrock near the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Giza, Egypt, without admitting people, air or contaminants. “All it leaves for us is the 1 to 5 percent of the landscape that might actually contain something interesting,” says Parcak.In 1985, the Egyptian Antiques Organization (EAO) asked Dr. More than discovery, the goal of the platform is to eliminate large swaths of land that have no archaeological features. Finally, after they've gotten the hang of looking at satellite imagery, the platform allows them to say whether or not they see some form of archaeological site.

People start with identifying looting, and after 500 completed tiles make their way to identifying encroachment structures, or illegal construction that happens on a site.

Citizen scientists will click through these tiles, which increase in difficulty as they progress. “We treat it like patient data,” Parcak says. The first is in Peru, where online archaeologists will look at more than 200,000 square kilometers of land, broken into 100x100 meter tiles scrubbed of GPS and mapping data. Just like terrestrial archaeology, GlobalXplorer is centered around expeditions. You learn, for example, that looting pits come in clusters they often take on a contrasting color to the rest of the satellite image, and sometimes they're marked by parallel lines that signal machinery like a bulldozer was used. Before someone can begin looking for sites, they'll watch tutorials on spotting landscape features commonly associated with looting pits, encroachments, and underground archaeological sites. To make that happen, first Parcak needs to train the rest of her collaborators. Archaeology, by contrast, tends to be lower-tech, but crowdsourcing makes a lot of sense when you think about how much land still needs to be explored. Another, called Galaxy Zoo, is using crowdsourcing to classify galaxies in order to better understand how they form, and yet anther, Foldit, focuses on identifying the folding patterns of proteins. Since it launched in 2012, citizen science platform EyeWire has enlisted more than 200,000 people to help map the 3-D structures of neurons, resulting in a peer reviewed paper in Nature.

THE GUNK SPACE ARCHAEOLOGISTS PROFESSIONAL

Crowdsourcing that process, she hopes, will allow professional archaeologists to speed up the discovery process. Parcak first outlined her plans for the platform last year at TED, explaining that the most time-consuming part of her job was scouring thousands of square miles of satellite imagery for visual anomalies on Earth’s surface.

THE GUNK SPACE ARCHAEOLOGISTS HOW TO

So today, Parcak is launching GlobalXplorer, an online platform that will teach anyone with a computer and an internet connection how to spot archaeological sites in satellite imagery. But Parcak believes that finding and protecting all of Earth’s hidden gems is going to take more than just professionally-trained scientists. It's a technical job: Parcak, who teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has a PhD, and so do most of her archaeology colleagues. Parcak is a space archaeologist, which means she spends her days looking for buried archaeological sites in high resolution imagery. Sarah Parcak wants to get that down to a few minutes. Usually it takes years of study to become an archaeologist-four years of reading books and a few more learning in the field before you finally get to play in the dirt professionally.

The gunk space archaeologists