Science Friday - Science Road Trips, Archaeology From Space. July 5, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

Summer is here—and that means it’s time for a road trip! Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton, co-authors of Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the Hidden Wonders of the World, join Ira to share some suggestions for sciencey things to see and do around the country, from unusual museum exhibits to outstanding natural wonders. Plus, we asked you for YOUR travel ideas—and did you deliver! We’ll share tourist tips from some regular Science Friday guests, and highlight some of your many suggestions. Speaking of summer trips... You might consider skipping the large urban centers, like Paris or Madrid, for something a little older—like Pompeii. The ancient city in Italy is one of the country’s largest tourist attractions, receiving over 4 million visitors a year. Perhaps it's because archaeology is inspiring tourism around the world. From Egypt, China, South America to India, archaeologists are experiencing a golden era of discovery thanks to new tools that help uncover buried civilizations. Sarah Parcak, professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama Birmingham and author of the new book Space Archaeology joins Ira to talk about what past civilizations can teach us about our current moment in time.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The long holiday weekend means that summer is definitely here. So how about a road trip? This hour places a science, technology, or environment lover should add for a good road trip itinerary, from aerospace attractions to exceptional zoos and lots in between. We're touring around the U.S. and beyond, and I've got a few season tour guides with me. Helen Morton is co-author of Atlas Obscura, an explorer's guide to the history. and Wonders of the World and a contributing editor at Atlas Obscura.

Welcome. Thank you. To Science Friday. Dylan Thuris is her co-author. He's also co-founder and creative director of Atlas Obscura. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having this year. You're welcome both here with me in our New York studios.

We've also asked you, everybody out there, to share your ideas for some must-see science sites, and over 200 of you responded. So we'll be sharing some of your tips this out. hour two. Dylan, let's start with you. You really liked something called the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis. So what is that? I grew up in Minneapolis. This is a place I went as a kid, and now I have kids of my own, and I would really like to take them there. It is the world's only library museum dedicated to medical electricity. So the use of electricity in human health and well-being. And it's a lovely kind of Tudor Mansion set back off of Lake Calhoun. So it's kind of a beautiful place to visit. It has all of these great electrical toys.

You know, electrostatic generators, like a Wimpshurst generator that you crank, and it makes these huge sparks. And in a sort of a nook, they have an exhibit that I still really love devoted to Ben Franklin's electricity parties. So when Ben Franklin was getting interested in electricity, it almost started out as like a lark. He bought these, he saw someone perform sort of these feats. And then he would get these static electricity tubes and he'd invite people over and then really he'd prank them. He'd load them up with static electricity and then make them go to kiss a conductor and they'd get a big shock. And he did all kinds of wacky stuff. All this is before the famous kind of kite key thing.

And he'd planned a big electric party where he, one of the stunts was going to be that he was going to cook a turkey with electricity. He attempted this and he very nearly got himself killed in the process. He accidentally discharged a laden jar, got a really nasty shock, and wrote to a friend saying that it was an experiment he had a desire to never repeat. Anyways, you can go, you can play with these toys, you can learn about Franklin's party. This is all in the museum. There's a room devoted basically to all of the instruments that you would use to have your own electricity party. And for a kid, it's really a fun place. That is cool.

Several of our listeners mentioned that, too. Laura Wittett called it Unique Science and Tech Museum with a focus on biometrical. plant medicine, and tech innovation with beautiful gardens, and a Frankenstein immersive theater show in Minneapolis. Also, true. Really fun. Okay, Ella, what's one of your top picks? Well, I saw this a few times come up on the Twitter followers' recommendations.

It's a place in Boston at Harvard. It is at the Natural History Museum. They have some great museums at Harvard. One is the Natural History. They also have the Peabody Museum, which is dedicated to anthropology. but at the Natural History Museum there is a particular exhibit of flowers and these flowers are made from glass and they were created by a father and son team

Rudolph and Leopold Blaschka and these Blaschkas were bohemians in the truest sense they were from Bohemia on the border of what was then Czechoslovakia and Germany and they created these flowers out of glass they were master craftsmen in the art of glass blowing and sculpting. And the botanists at Harvard needed a way for their students to study plants, but to be able to study plants in 3D, you know, there's a limited amount of time

during which you can look at them and study them before they start to wither and die. And you can look at things like pressings or you could look at paper mashay models, but they just weren't quite realistic enough to be able to study in detail and in a prolonged way. So the Blasquez created thousands of these glass flowers. And when you walk into the museum, they've redone it recently so that they're displayed in these gorgeous wooden and glass cabinets. And it's one room dedicated to all of them. If you didn't know they were made of glass, you probably wouldn't guess because they're so delicate and the leaves are so thin and they're coloured, they've been painting, So the flowers are incredible, but there's one particular subdivision within that that I found super fascinating,

which are rotten apples, apples affected by fungus and various diseases that they have sculpted and painted with such loving care. And they're beautiful. They are somehow gorgeous, these rotten apples. So you can examine those up close. Outside of Boston, right out there with all kinds of good stuff. Right, yeah, you can swing by the MIT. Museum, go to the Maparium, stand in the center of a globe. It's good time about that. You're shaking ahead, Dylan. You agree?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boston has a ton of really wonderful things. The Maparium is one of my favorites. It's more geography than science, but one of the coolest things, actually, is it's a huge three-story glass globe. You step inside, you stand in the middle. And if you're not interested in the amazing geography and seeing this sort of from a perfect perspective, because it's actually one of the only places where you can see.

the size of the country is accurately displayed on a map. They're all distorted. Even on a globe, they're distorted because you're looking at a sphere from the outside. Even if you're not interested in that part, it has incredible acoustics because it's this huge glass sphere. So depending where you stand, it has a whispering gallery effect. It has kind of a magnification effect. If you're in the middle, it's just a really wonderful place to visit. We asked some of our friends and colleagues around the country for suggestions.

You've heard them on our news round up. or state of science segments, and now they get to play tour guide. I'm Sarah Kaplan, and I'm a science reporter at The Washington Post, and I'm really lucky to live in Washington, D.C., which is a great place for science travel. We've got the Smithsonian Museum, so I can go to the Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of Natural History, the zoo. But I want to recommend some science destinations that are kind of off the beaten path. I love to go to the National Arboretum, where scientists are studying all kinds of things about plants.

their diseases, their genetics. You can see trees there from all around the world. You can also go to the space window at the National Cathedral, which is stained glass inspired by the Apollo 11 photos and actually contains a sliver of rock brought back by Apollo 11 astronauts. Another favorite thing to do is take the accidental fossil tour of D.C. The city is full of limestone and marble buildings, and those rocks are really good at preserving fossils. I've seen fossils. in the limestone around the tidal basin, in the marble entryway of the National Gallery of Art. If you go to DC fossils.org, you can find a guide to where to find lots of these fossils. I really hope you enjoy visiting my city. Yeah.

I used to live in D.C. for many years. It's incredible when you study what actually you can see in terms of his history, right? Yeah, I love the idea of looking at buildings, not for their architectural history, but their geological history. and seeing ancient sea life embedded in the side of these buildings is really such a cool experience. I also love that she mentioned the space window at the Washington National Cathedral

because that is a building that has some hidden elements that people might not notice. It has a tiny Darth Vader on the outside of it, a little, not a gargoyle. There's another name for it. Basically a gargoyle. But if you look really closely, you can find it. Yeah. Let's go to another quote from one of our columnist. Maggie Kerth Baker, who's a science reporter at 538, she's regular on Science Friday.

She had a suggestion. If I could take somebody anywhere in my neck of the woods, I would take them to the ice roads that go out on the Lake Superior in the winter. My sister-in-law lives up near Bayfield, Wisconsin, and the ice freezes solid enough that you can drive a truck over it out to an island off the shore. It's really fantastic. and there's also these really amazing sea caves where the ice over in winter and these stalactites of ice hang down from the ceiling in all these just amazing colors from the minerals that seep through the ground as the ice forms. There's only about a week or two each winter that you can go and check them out.

It's really just completely spectacular. Yeah. Isn't that something? Wow. As a kid from Minnesota, I can attest it. There's a waterfall in Minneapolis called Minnehaha Falls. And during that same week that you can get out to the Apostle Cays, people go and they sneak behind this waterfall because it's just a set of frozen ice stalagiteites. It's amazing. That's a great suggestion.

Let me go to another reaction from Eli Chen, who is regular from St. Louis Public Radio. For those who are willing to travel just a little outside of St. Louis, The Endangered Wolf Center in Eureka is one of my favorite places to go because you can see really rare canine species like the Mexican gray wolf or the African painted dog, which move around really gracefully. There's also something called the Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail that's in Weldon Spring. It's basically a site of entombed ways from the Manhattan Project. so you can learn all about its legacy in St. Louis if you want to. And because it's on a really high point, you can also watch birds and stargaze on top of it, too. And I'd also like to add, if you're near anywhere that does a Story Collider show, try to find out if you can attend.

And listen to some great personal stories about science. Yeah, there are a lot of personal stories about science. So many. Great. I'll let you're a co-author of an explorer's guide to the hidden wonders of the world. That's right. Say I want to go somewhere and leave the U.S. and go find some place to explore. Perhaps London, where there are a lot of science museums there or someplace in Paris? We actually, to Atlas Sonskir, we run some tours.

We take people around the world to different places, and we're running a science and medicine tour to London coming up. in September. So it's in collaboration with the New York Times, and we're going to be going to a bunch of places, but one of the places we're going to be taking people is to this old operating theater, basically in the attic of this building, that dates back to the 1700s.

It's incredible. You know, you sit around on these little benches, and on this tour, you're going to get to see a surgical demonstration in the operating theater. So that's a place that I think is really cool for science. and medical interested folks that's in London. We're talking this hour about things to see on your vacation, places to visit if you're interested in science and great science vacations,

with my guest, Dylan Thuris, co-founder and creative director of Atlas Obscura, and co-author of Atlas Obscura, an explorer's guide to the hidden wonders of the world, and Ella Morton, his co-author, also contributing editor, at Atlas Obscure. And we asked a lot of listeners early on and some of the folks we've had on as regulars to suggest where we might go. And we now have Kiki Sanford who belongs to this week in science. Hi, Ira. This is Dr. Kiki from Portland, Oregon. And ooh, the Columbia River Gorge near Portland in the Bonneville Dam and Fish Ladders. So many volcanoes, Mount St. Helens. Also, the Hanford

nuclear site is just upriver in Washington. Have a great summer. Yeah, that whole western part of the states, right? Yeah. I mean, if you're in Hanford to visit the nuclear site, you might as well go to LIGO, because that's where one of the gravitational observatories is, one of the two in the U.S., and they offer tours to the public.

I haven't been to either yet, but I really want to go. Let me bring in another contributor, Francie Deep, staff writer at Pacific Standard. Not many folks visit the Olympic Peninsula across the Puget Sound from where I grew up, but it's got some pretty cool stuff. the Zetumperate Rainforest, and the Macaul Cultural and Research Center, one of the first tribe-run anthropology museums in the country.

The Olympic Peninsula is, I don't know if I'm just really into quiet, but in the Ho Valley rainforest there in the National Park, it has one square inch of silence. It's an attempt by an audio ecologist named Gordon Hempton to preserve natural soundscapes because they're vanishing very rapidly. There's very few places you can go in the world where you can listen to 20 minutes of natural sounds and not hear some sign of human habitation,

whether that's an airplane or a car engine. It's surprisingly hard to get to a place of true natural silence. So this is an attempt to preserve one of those locations. Give us another recommendation. Sure. So recently I was in Buffalo to look around. I'd never been there before. It's my alma mater.

Oh, really? Yes. Sunni? There you go. There you go. Way long time ago. So, yes, I mean, Buffalo's been through a lot in the last few decades. It's suffered a lot economically. There's been a lot of population loss. Most people, most tourism focuses on the architecture and the art deco nature of it. But there's a lot of rejuvenation happening.

That's really interesting. While I was there, I was scampering around abandoned grain elevators and going to old places that are being repurposed. And probably, the most fascinating one I went to was a location that used to be known as the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, which is not a phrase we would use nowadays, but that's how it began in 1880. And it was designed under this philosophy called the Kirkbride Plan, which was established by a psychiatrist named Thomas Kirkbride. And he took a whole new approach to the treatment of mental illness. He decided that buildings that were devoted to psychiatric hospitals should be these long horizontal buildings and they would have an administration in the center and the wings would span out

from that. And the furthest, there was a male side and a female side and the furthest away you were from the center determined like the severity of your affliction. And the idea was that as you got better, you would move closer and closer to the center until one day you could walk out the doors. And it also emphasized the importance of nature. So there was a lot of fresh air. There were these beautifully landscaped grounds. The ones in Buffalo were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vorks. And there were tons of these Kirkbride Plan mental health institutions all across the U.S.

The vast majority have been demolished now. because even though Kirkbride had some really good ideas about mental health that treated patients more humanely, he did also kind of assume that people would eventually be cured from whatever they were suffering. There was not really any accommodation for the idea that people would live with a mental illness for the rest of their life. It was this idea of being cured by nature. So this particular institution in Buffalo, it opened in 1880 and the... the last patients left in the 1970s. And then these beautiful Victorian buildings just sat there for several decades abandoned.

But in recent years, they've decided to pour a bunch of money into rejuvenating the place. And at the moment, the central three buildings of the former psychiatric hospital have been transformed into a hotel, a restaurant. There are these art galleries. There's an architecture center. And it's kind of incredible because when you think about a, what was previously termed an asylum being turned into a hotel, it's sort of an uneasy transformation. You know, the idea of staying at a hotel in a room once occupied by a patient is a little bit strange for some people. But the way that they've approached it is very respectful of the history.

And they've preserved so much of the architecture. They make a real effort to show you what it was like and give you a. sense of the development of the treatment of mental health and psychology. So I just found it fascinating to wander around the grounds. And they have these really huge hallways that are really long in the hotel. It's almost like the shining. No one are rivers of blood or twins or anything. But yeah, it's just, it's fascinating to walk around and imagine what it must have been like back in the day.

I'll give you another northern New York state one. In Syracuse University, you should stop by and look for the tree of 40 fruit. Now would be a good time, actually, because it's summer. So this is a tree created by an artist, and it's a graft of 40 different varieties of stone fruit. So this single tree bears plums, peaches, almonds, which I didn't know were a stone fruit until I learned about this tree. And it's just, it's incredible. Where do you see this? So this is on Syracuse University.

And, you know, in the winter, it just looks like a normal tree until you see it kind of coming to life with all these different flowers and different fruits. It's a special place. And then once you get to Boston, you should go on the top floor of a library, a university library there. You'll find a small collection of medical specimens. And it's a particularly interesting set because among the collection is the skull of a patient named Phineas Gage, who's a very fine. famous neurology patient because he had a railroad spike accidentally blown through his head. He survived, but his personality changed and he became a landmark case. He did, yeah.

In neurology. So you can see the skull, you can see a death mask, and actually the spike itself is all in this just little kind of hard-to-find medical collection at the top of this library. We have a lot of listeners who called in with suggestions. Let me move to a part of the country. We haven't really talked about yet, and that's Florida. Wendy Williams writes, I'm in games. Florida, I would visit the butterfly rainforest at the Florida Museum, go when you have a bit of time and enjoy the wonders of it.

Rachel Lekavoni says the conservation of Southwest Florida in Naples is always cool, especially if you want to hear about and or see some of the invasive pythons that could swallow you all. Oh, great. Yeah. A bit north is Karashan State Park, which is a science-meets history excursion because it was a... A cult that loved botany. Oh, that sounds amazing. That sounds like a relatively innocuous cult. That's our very squarely in our area of interest.

Is it? Botanical cult. Sure, yeah. Yeah, science cult. That's Atlas Obscura territory. Texas, Amanda Rojas writes, there's a lot of techie things to do in Austin. But if you want to unplug and do a nature thing,

I suggest grabbing a seat along the hike and bike trail east of the Congress Avenue Bridge to watch the Mexican tree-tailed bats. Yes. Do you know that one? Oh, yes. We took a group actually on kayaks with a guy named Merlin Tuttle, who's kind of the father of bat conservation. And we all went out, and we sat in the middle of this river,

and we watched the bats come out. And it is an astonishment. There's a million bats in this bridge alone. It is astonishing. Yeah, because that is something you have to go look for. You've got to find out where those things are happening. and you're in the right place at the right time. Exactly.

Let me talk about near Dallas. Someone writes it, I'm in Dallas, so we have a wide variety between Dallas and Fort Worth. The Perot Museum and Fort Worth Museum of Nature and Science, Australian lungfish, the world's largest alligator snapping turtle at the Children's Aquarium in Fair Park. And there's also the world-famous dinosaur tracks and more obscure petrified wood buildings

of Glenrose and Bat World Sanctuary and Mineral Falls. I can't even bring up Dallas as pretty much only carnivorous plant gallery. But that would be bragging. Oh, I love carnivorous plants. Can I mention a carnivorous plant place? Sure. Absolutely. Okay, so in Wilmington, in North Carolina,

there's a place called the Stanley Redder Carnivorous Plant Garden. And it is devoted exclusively to carnivorous plants, with which I've had an obsession since I was about eight. I didn't realize until recently that Venus fly traps only grow natively in about as 60-mile radius of Wilmington, North Carolina. Is that right? Yeah, which seems so restrictive. I think it used to be a larger range, but it's just on the coastal swampy area of North and South Carolina. And so this garden is named after a guy who was just wild about carnivorous plants.

He passed away about six years ago, but his legacy has been this garden. which is a quiet and peaceful place that you can wander through and see a bunch of Venus fly traps and also pitcher plants, which are these sort of bell-shaped plants that will swallow insects. There's one particularly fascinating pitcher plant that is native to Borneo that has a symbiotic relationship with a tree shrew, and the shrew essentially poops inside it, and the nitrates from that are food to the pitcher plant. So pitcher plants and their digestive juices have always fascinated me. But this particular garden is just a nice tranquil place full of carnivorous plants.

And also was the subject, was the target, rather, for a heist in 2013. A thousand Venus fly traps were stolen, which is actually a felony in North Carolina. but the culprits were caught and the garden was replenished. What do you do with a thousand? I know. I guess you sell them on the black market. Who's your face? Hey, buddy, I've got a thousand thin and a slide traps here if you're interested.

I think they're worth about $20 each, so that was a significant heist. Kevin Rusnack writes, The National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Kevin writes, check out the research and development hangar. When I give museum tours for the Air Force Research Lab, I start with the early wind tunnels in their World War One gallery and go all the way to spaceflight. That's kind of cool stuff, you know, because one of the places I visited, there are a couple of airplane graveyards. Have you been to them? There's a famous one out in Arizona, the Boneyard.

Tucson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've always wanted to go on there. I've seen pictures. How was it? It's awe-inspiring because there are thousands of planes. They are all lined up and some are famous, some are not. And, you know, they're in storage.

You think, hey, why don't they wheel this one out again? You know, you should go to visit it because it's a... I would love to check it out. I was just learning about a place just outside of Las Vegas, which is a collection of Blackbird planes, these secret planes that were used to do all of this photo reconnaissance. It's the only place for you can see all of them together and learn basically about all the missions that these planes ran

that were classified for 20, 30, 40 years after they did them. I'm Margaret Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. A listener writes, I live in a very small town in Montana, but we're home to NIAD's Rocky Mountain Lab, where scientists study all kinds of infectious diseases, including Ebola.

That sounds, that's great. Hope they're not giving out sample. You visit the CDC outside of Washington too. There's another good collection. Where's the Tick collection, Ella? That's like another good disease collection. Yes. Sarah mentioned some Smithsonian places in D.C.,

but you don't have to go to D.C. to see Smithsonian collections. There are some very specific ones that are housed elsewhere. There is a Tick collection at Georgia Southern University in St. Statesboro, and they have over a million specimens of the 860-odd tick species that have been thus far identified. And you can make an appointment to go and see these ticks. They're not living. They are dead.

But it's a really valuable resource for scientists and entomologists and people who study infectious diseases because ticks do carry these diseases. Lyme disease that are not super well understood. And they also host a, I don't know that it's technically a tick symposium, but it is a two-week tick workshop that covers everything you would ever need to know about ticks. It's happened twice so far. It just happened in May. But it's one of the very specific collections at Georgia Southern University.

and if you're going on a tour of Georgia University odd things, this one isn't so visually interesting, but at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta is the first ever time capsule, and it was installed in 1936. It's called the Crypt of Civilization. And you can't go inside and look at things, obviously, because it is a time capsule. I think it's scheduled to be opened in like the year 8,000,

113, which is a significant amount of time away. So we'll see if Earth lasts that long. But they have an itemized list of everything that they put inside. And it's essentially 1930s pop culture. There are things like stockings and wigs and just run-of-the-mill day-to-day things that are interesting because they're from the 1930s. But that is the first time capsule. Before we run out of time here in the next minute,

One more suggestion from a listener, Kirsten B. It's rainy or really cold the Maine State Museum. A lot of history, but also natural history. The history of our industry, which is also a story of technology and science, meaning mills, fishing, and forestry. When it's nice outside in Maine, you are required to be outdoors. That is true. It's a good philosophy.

You can always visit Acadia National Park. which is very beautiful, very beautiful. It's a gorgeous place. We've run out of the time. I'd like thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Ella Morton is co-author of Atlas Obscura, an explorer's guide to the Hidden Wonders of the World, and a contributing editor at Atlas Obscura.

And Dylan Thuris, he is co-author. He's also a co-founder and creative director of Atlas Obscura here in New York. Thank you both. Thanks so much. When are we going on this trip? What are we taking off? Taxi. Leflin.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Thinking about taking a big trip this summer, you might consider skipping more popular destinations like Paris or Madrid for something a little older, like, let's say, Pompeii. The ancient city in Italy

receives over four million visitors a year. It's one of the country's biggest tourist attractions, hollowed out buildings, cobblestone streets, delicate mosaics, are all that's left of this ancient Roman civilization. after it was covered by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Why are so many drawn thousands of miles to experience what is essentially a ghost town? Perhaps because there's a modern lesson to be learned from the city's ancient history

and because everywhere, archaeology is inspiring tourism. Egypt, India, China, South America, archaeologists are experiencing a golden era of discovery thanks to new tools that help uncover buried civilizations and a desire to understand what past civilizations can teach us about our current moment in time. Joining me now is someone famous for digging up the secrets of ancient cultures, and she's got a great new book out, Archaeology from Space,

how the future shapes are past. Sarah Parkhack, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama and Birmingham. Welcome to Science Writer, welcome back. Thank you. It's great to be back. So what is contributing to this golden age of archaeology that we're experiencing right now? It's the extraordinary application of science, both from things like satellite imagery and DNA studies. Archaeologists are collaborating with computer scientists. They're looking at big data and machine learning.

And all this amazing new data, it's allowing us to ask completely new questions. of the archaeological record. Such as. So, for example, instead of looking at a couple of sites that you're able to survey over the course of a season, instead you're looking at a data set of thousands of archaeological sites and you're able to, from space, see evidence of architecture on top of the sites and make inferences about their time period looking at when civilizations rose and collapsed based on the actual number of cities or sites that were occupied at the time.

So you could look at the satellite data from the comfort of your office in Alabama without having to go on to the site first. Sometimes you have to. You know, my colleagues who work in places like Iraq and Syria, of course, haven't been able to visit many of these sites for the last number of years because of ongoing conflict. But what it really allows you to do as well is target sites to visit on the ground, whether you're doing survey work or excavation. And if you find a site that has something that looks really extraordinary, maybe a temple, maybe part of a city, then you know it's there and you can go and start digging. And from reading your experiences in your book, you really love getting your hands dirty there.

You talk about digging through the soil. The inner five-year-old is screaming, is how you describe it. That's right. Now that we have a young child, he's six, almost seven. And I get that visceral excitement. He's kind of taught me again what it was like to be a kid. And I'm glad to say that I haven't lost it too much. Well, tell me about that.

Why is your inner five-year-old screaming? What excites you so much about this? Well, I think, you know, this idea that when you're digging, you never know what's going to come up in the next trowel scrape. And it's this constant drug, right? you're just digging and digging and digging and hoping for that hit of excitement because one scrape of the trowel, you could be hitting a new wall. You could be uncovering part of a relief, the face of someone that hasn't been seen in thousands of years. You know, I've gotten to

travel all over the world. I've gotten to do some pretty amazing things. And it's the most thrilling activity I know. And it runs in your family, doesn't it? You write about your grandfather here as being an influence. So my grandfather was a pioneer in the application of aerial photography to forestry. He was a forestry professor at the University of Maine in Orno. And while we make kind of think, well, aerial photography, I mean, it's 2019. But when he started using it in the 40s and 50s, this was cutting edge technology. He used it to map tree hides.

He used it to identify specific species, to, to, to, go out and look at for paper production. And he's the reason I took my first remote sensing course as an undergraduate. I thought, well, what did Grampi do? I wonder if this could be applied to archaeology. That is really cool. But you also write that pyramids and temples are amazing things to discover from the air or on the ground. Those features are rare, though, and represent a tiny fraction of what archaeologists find.

We are far more likely to dig up a wall or a room in a small house, and it may seem less glamorous. but trust me, those are the findings that inform history over time. And as it turns out, satellites are just a thing to help find them. You know, when you think about the number of people maybe that lived in an ancient capital city, sure, you've got the king and maybe some priests. But the bulk of the people that lived in the past were just like us, you know, living their lives, going to work, dealing with their families. and that's the preponderance of the evidence that we find in the archaeological record. And it's really hard to pinpoint without using any kind of technologies exactly where these walls or other features might be. And that's what the satellites allow us to do. It's almost like a space-based x-ray that allows you to see exactly where to dig

so that you can target your excavations and reveal these rooms and houses that allow you to tell the story of everyday people from so long ago. And you talk about Africa being, one of the greatest frontiers for archaeological discovery in the world. Why is that? So when you think about vast areas of the planet that have not been fully explored archaeologically, one of the major places is the dense rainforest that makes up the heart of Central Africa. While the movie Black Panther was, of course, fictional, you know, Wakanda doesn't exist. the essence of this grand civilization being hidden somewhere in the heart of Africa, I think, is true. There could be multiple civilizations there. And I think when you apply new laser technologies similar to

those that have been applied in Cambodia and in Central America, I think archaeologists are going to be blown away and the history of the continent could potentially be rewritten. And even in South America, we've followed the people writing books and doing research, discovering ancient civilizations in South America where the jungles are overgrown now, but where you say in your book there could be thousands of old civilizations? I think, yeah, I think of the work of people like, you know, Michael Heckenberger are doing, you know, the book, the Lost City of Z, while sort of semi-mythological. Also, there's some truth to it, this idea that there are these grand cities that existed in the heart of Brazil. and what other specialists have done looking at satellite imagery, they've revealed dozens and dozens of these sites

and extrapolating that over the area of the landscape of Brazil. I mean, yeah, there could be thousands of these. That's one of my favorite books. It's amazing. Amazing book. Too bad the movie didn't do it justice. But moving on. What was the first project that you worked on that used the tools of space archaeology?

The first project I did was as, an undergraduate, so almost 20 years ago, and I looked at infrared satellite imagery from NASA to try to find water sources along the west coast of Sinai. And it might not seem like a big project, but the reality is most ancient cultures couldn't survive in the desert without water. So you find the water source and you find the sites. So that was my kind of my first introduction to this bigger world and pulled me in. I got to do some survey work, found some really cool sites and features, and that just got me hooked. And were other archaeologists easily convinced that this was a great way to look at stuff? It was a hard science to not just break into, but to use. You know,

I was definitely one of the early adopters, definitely not the first person. There was a cohort of us that really started using the technology 15 to 20 years ago. But I think a lot of our colleagues thought, oh, silver bullet solution, roll of eyes, you know, that's never going to work. What are you doing, preaching to us about this new science? But now when you go to an archaeological conference, you know, nearly everyone is looking at and using satellite imagery, it's become a core tool, part of the archaeological toolkit. You're right that these discoveries are mere hints. of the insights now available to archaeologists, thanks to new technologies, but it is never just about the discovery or even new theories. This is about shaking archaeological foundations,

testing new ideas that sometimes work well, and sometimes leave more questions than answers. So I think of the really amazing work that's being done by my colleagues at Tulane University. So there were global headlines about a year, year and a half ago when this team used laser imagery taken from airplanes, this technology called LiDAR, and it revealed over 60,000 new features at the site of T-Call alone. And they've been able to map thousands upon thousands of previously unmapped sites throughout Central America. And my colleagues have told me this, there's enough data there to launch 5,000 PhDs of, you know, for the the first time, people who specialize in the Maya can look at an entire landscape that was occupied by the Maya over time and ask new questions about how and why that civilization rose and collapse. Can you imagine what having that data for the whole of the Earth's surface could do

for understanding our human history? But yet, do you think we have any machine learning or any AI that can take the place of the human eye? I mean, the people are still the best at picking out patterns and things, are they not? They are, but the challenge that I face and my colleagues face is, you know, 99.99% of the time we spend looking at satellite imagery, we're not finding anything. You know, we're looking through vast areas of desert or large areas of forest. And what machine learning can do is help to prioritize areas where there could be potential sites or features. And I think a great application of this would be to target. or pinpoint areas, say, where there's looting going on, you know, in a massive landscape,

do you want to spend 100 hours looking for the looting, or do you want to spend five minutes and say, yes, indeed, that's a looting pit? So I think it could really help us to target our search. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking with anthropologist Sarah Parcac, author of Archaeology from Space, how the future shapes are past. Let me go right to the last part of that title. How does the Future Shape Are We Are Past? past. All these new technologies were able to gather so much more data, we're able to pinpoint areas to excavate and explore in places that we never thought possible. And all of a sudden, with all this new information, you know, instead of a data set of five tombs, we're looking at a

data set of a thousand tombs and we're able to tell much better and more nuanced stories about specific periods of time. So I think for me, for me, me, the more these technologies develop, the more we're able to gather all this information, the past comes to life in ways that it can't when you're not looking at as much data. And so how do you get archaeological digs funded? It's a huge challenge, you know, all over the world. Governments are cutting funding for the arts. But there's a big study that just came out here in the U.S., you know, cultural tourism brings in

tens of billions of dollars to the U.S. annually and does around the world. So what I'm hoping that with helping to popularize the science with making people kind of be more aware and more excited about the past and the role that it can play in informing us about our world today, governments will provide more funding because you've got, I don't know, a less than five or 10 percent chance at getting money from the National Science Foundation. Of course, we take money from private donors as well, but it's really, really hard to get Diggs funded. Do you think that books like yours, do you consider yourself a popularizer of archaeology and performing a useful function that way? Yeah, I think I've stepped into the role over the last kind of four or five years.

I certainly didn't enter archaeology with this in mind at all. I was very content to sort of do my research. And over time, started doing more and more outreach and more television work. And I think a lot more archaeologists are doing it, especially the younger professors or students in grad school. I think it's an essential role. You know, we're combating things like, you know, the idea that aliens built the pyramids, which is ridiculous and frankly racist. So many of the sort of the rise in populism, white nationalists, they're subverting and using. archaeological symbolism to forward their goals. So I think it's up to archaeologists to really step up and

show that the great role that archaeology can play, not just in combating these views, but also in inspiring us and giving us a sense of hope for the future right now. And I think we all need a little bit more hope right now. Can people sign up for an archaeological dig someplace? Yes, they can. So what I recommend people do is the Archaeological Institute of America has an Archaeological fieldwork bulletin online, and there are a number of archaeological projects that will take volunteers for a day around the country. Certainly places like the UK, it's possible to go volunteer for a day or two. There's young archaeology, societies. Every country's different. But there are also a number of programs around the U.S. where museums will have, you know,

spend an afternoon with a curator, learn what happens in museums. The The organization I run Global Explorer is an online citizen science platform, and anyone in the world, especially kids, can get online and help look at satellite imagery and find archeological sites. So there's a lot of ways for kids to get involved. We certainly hope they will get involved. Thank you very much, Dr. Parkak, for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having me. And this wonderful new book, Dr. Sarah Parkak is professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. And her book is Archaeology from Space.

How the future shapes are past. And we have an excerpt. You can find it up on our website at ScienceFriety.com slash cultures. We have a special announcement. We have a new app you can use to add your voice to our shows. It's a way for us to interact with you to get you involved in our coverage. It's available for iPhone and Android, so search for SciFri Vox Pop. Wherever you get your apps, SciFriVox Pop, V-O-X-P,

and share your voice comments for our upcoming shows. And a quick program note, we'll be hitting the road again this August coming to San Antonio. Join us on Saturday, August 10th for Science Friday Live from the Lone Star State. We'll talk about science stories in the San Antonio area, have live music and more. That's Saturday, August 10th, not Friday, Saturday night, August 10th for Science Friday Live. info and tickets at Science Friday.com slash San Antonio. Charles Berkowitz is our director,

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