FROM SPACE TO SHOVEL

摘要

Lots of people live in Egypt. They always have. So how do you find ancient ruins when modern humans live and farm the land? Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham uses images from a hyperspectral satellite, which has cameras that take pictures in various wavelengths. She sorts the data to reveal the high concentrations of organic matter and phosphorus content that mark ancient Egyptian house mounds. Then she gets a closer look and starts to dig.rntechnical knowledge. In doing so, it rewards a certain comfort with computing not typically found among the old guard. Parcak was 23 when she started her dissertation on satellite imaging at the University of Cambridge. She searched papers in geology and other fields for information on how to analyze satellite images; there was no textbook for remote archaeology. (Now an old hand six years later, she's writing it.) But the utility of her approach soon became clear.