Sarah Parcak: belief

Transcript context

…How accurate do you think is our picture of available technologies in the late Bronze Age? How much do we know? How much do we not know? People discovered this computation mechanism from ancient Greece. No one expected that. Are we just totally in the dark, and we’re going to be shocked for the next few centuries? Or do we more or less have it right? I think we’re going to be continuously amazed at what we find about the past. We assume we know so much about how pyramids were built, or how people in the past calculated time or distance, or their construction techniques. Now, with so many advances in our own abilities to interpret the past — whether it’s through infrared scanning technologies we’re able to read burnt scrolls from places like Herculaneum. Whether it’s new and far more accurate dating techniques. Whether it’s new DNA studies where we’re able to understand not just that, okay, this group of mummies that was excavated in Egypt 100 years ago, we know that they’re royal. Now we know how they are related to each other. I think, with our own application of physics and chemistry and biology and computation machine learning — putting all these new tools to use, looking at the past, we’re far better able to understand all of their diverse technologies. Of course, we only ever uncover a thousandth of a percent, a teeny tiny fraction of a percent of all that comes from the past. What was left, what was melted down, what was traded, what was repurposed. I think, and I think my colleagues would agree, we are in a golden age of archaeological discovery right now. Look at all these amazing headlines that we keep seeing in the paper. We’re going to see some of the most incredible archaeological discoveries ever found in the next few decades. How were the great pyramids built, now that you bring it up?…

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