Sarah Parcak Quotes

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

My dream is to map every archaeological site in the world because, if we can do that, then we have this massive global data base that all sorts of global heritage organizations and heritage organizations within countries can use, and they can use that information to protect what's there.

We've found that patterns of site looting have increased between 500 and 1000 percent since the start of the Arab Spring. Now this is a problem as old as human beings. People were looting tombs 5,000 years ago in Egypt as soon as people were buried, but the problem is only getting worse and worse.

An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.

Saddam Hussein was fascinated by ancient Babylon and Assyria. He made money available to protect and develop the great archaeological sites. The great achievements of Mesopotamian civilisation were pressed into the service of the Ba'athist regime.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

I think it's clever how Rome have kept a load of old stuff. There's no overheads, yet people are going over there to see it.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

We are the only ones who really can care about the preservation Foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care about preservation, but the majority care about discoveries.

I wanted to go back to Sun. Unfortunately, most of the gear is gone from Sun. The way I take it now, it's almost like a tourist destination. So, it would have been pretty difficult to have brought all the gear into Sun to make it like it was in the '50's.

I think Star City should have Unesco World Heritage status. It will need to be adapted a little bit and made more glamorous than it looks now, but it should definitely be protected for the future.

Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island.

I like to have Chinese furniture in my home as a constant and painful reminder of how much has been destroyed in China. The contrast between the beauty of the past and the ugliness of the modern is nowhere sharper than in China.

There are so many previously unknown sites and structures all over the world. And I think most importantly what satellites help to show us is we've actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world.

When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

I keep being surprised by the amount of archaeological sites and features that are left to find all over the world.

One of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. Use science to, you know, work backwards and say, 'Well, really, what were they thinking?'

These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

Much has been said and continues to be said of what little concern the Turks had for the Acropolis treasures.

History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

We want to excite the world about what's out there. But we don't want them to say, 'Oh, there are lots of sites in Egypt - let's loot.'

With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we're in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past?

We only have a limited amount of time left before many archaeological sites all over the world are destroyed. So we have to be really selective about where we dig.

We can't let the past be forgotten.