Sarah Parcak: preference

Transcript context

…Which do you think is a bigger threat to archaeological sites — economic development or looting? Economic development. A lot of people look at looting and they think, “Oh, it’s looting, you’re stealing from sites. All these sites are threatened.” Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but looting has been going on for thousands of years. We have potsherds from 5,000 years ago in Egypt that were worn down from people digging out tombs of the earliest wealthy burials. People have been stealing from tombs for a very long time. It’s part of the human condition. I would say economic development and encroachment. It’s not particularly sexy at all. It bores people. People want to hear stories of looting because encroachment is much more difficult. If you look at archaeological sites in Egypt, in Peru, in China, in India — all over the world — there simply aren’t as many places for people to live, and so a big open site . . . Or maybe their village is close by, and it’s easy to expand. The other issue, of course, is where do you bury your dead? A lot of governments don’t have good plans for that, so of course, they encroach upon these sites. There’s unchecked development around the world. Certainly, in places like Central Asia, this is a huge problem. With new pipelines being put in, with cities expanding — and in so many cases, there’s not good documentation of archaeological sites. I’d say encroachment and economic development. And why do we need to grow 10 percent or 20 percent every year? This ties into much greater questions around globalization and global development. Given that looting protects collectible goods, and at least sometimes — depends who loots — but it puts the goods into the hands of collectors who have a profit incentive to take care of them. How should we think about what is the optimum degree of looting? Because if there’s no looting, development might destroy the site.…

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