Sarah Parcak: preference

Transcript context

…As you know, in places such as Luxor, often people who live there — they’ll build homes on top of elite tombs. What should archaeologists do about that? Just leave it alone? Try to move the people out? Is there a way to deal with the people who are living there that is a fair bargaining position, given that the government might be on your side rather than theirs? That’s a really interesting question. On the screen behind me right now — I don’t know if there will end up being a screenshot of it, and I’m happy to share the image so you can post it on your website— this is Lisht, and you see behind me, we’re standing on an almost 4,000-year-old cemetery, but we have the modern cemetery right behind us. Archaeological sites are living places more often than not. It’s not like they were abandoned thousands of years ago or hundreds of years ago, and people are gone. The local communities living on these sites or next to them are essential. Community archaeology is a really, really important part of the field of archaeology. First and foremost, when we excavate in the field, we’re anthropologists. We’re cultural anthropologists, so you have to speak the local language. I speak Arabic. I’m not completely fluent, but I know enough. I’m certainly fluent in Egyptian culture. All my workforce is Egyptian. My core staff — it’s a joint mission with the Ministry of Antiquities, so it means that I have an Egyptian co-director, and you have to have really close working relationships with local villagers because, ultimately, they’re the ones who are the stewards and guardians of these sites, and they’ve, in many cases, never had a chance to connect with these places, and there’s a lot of economic opportunity there, so I think we have to tread very carefully. In a lot of instances, the people who are living on or next to sites are related to the people who lived there thousands of years ago. As inconvenient as it might be that their houses are there, these are human beings, and they’ve lived in these places for a very, very long time. How do you deal with these situations sensitively? We’re having a lot of really difficult conversations right now. Certainly, in Egypt and Luxor and the village that was on top of a lot of the tombs of the New Kingdom — the Egyptian government basically evicted the folks who were living there. A lot of the tombs had been damaged, and now they’re conserving the tombs. That’s a decision that the Ministry of Antiquities in the Egyptian government made. There were a lot of protests. I’m not in a position, I feel like, to criticize what they did. It happened. That was a decision they made. They felt it was best for their own heritage, and we have to listen very carefully to foreign governments in places where we work. Yes, this is a problem all over the world. What do we do? Do you just evict families with kids? And these communities — that’s the other important thing. These are communities, and they’re not all stealing from these sites. They just happen to live there. This is a big question, one that I think we’ll be dealing with for the next hundred or more years. Which do you think is a bigger threat to archaeological sites — economic development or looting?…

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