by Sarah Parcak
The little old lady just looked at me, shook her head, pushed me to the side, and, in one motion, heaved the cage onto her head and walked down the ramp to applause. I deserved the humiliation; I’d made every possible wrong assumption. And in that moment, I realized just how strong people across the world really are when they do intense physical labor daily, and how strong people have been for thousands of years. I bet those folks are still laughing.
Insights for Our Future
Archaeology, just like my experience on the ferry, should inspire us and humble us in equal measure with all the insights it gives us into past cultures. Some populations of humans (modern Homo sapiens) moved from East Africa into the rest of the world, beginning, many anthropologists think, over 60,000 years ago. Using our feet and small boats, we dispersed and eventually settled in virtually every habitable corner. In the process, our ancestors adapted to very different conditions from where they first arose—cold, hot, dry, and wet climates. After growing up in Maine, I’ve lived in the South now for 12 years, and I have come to like the heat. A lot. Also, my biscuits are fabulous. I’ve evolved, like our ancestors.
The past teaches us that we can adapt quickly, but also that when we do not adapt fast enough, our settlements and even way of life can collapse. Rainforests now cover cities and cultures that never could have envisioned their own demise. Collapse is never simple or caused by one factor but many interacting factors. Archaeology can give us perspective, to see such events in all their complexity, as we’ve seen in so many instances discussed in this book.
For our survival, there is now a push for the colonization of Mars.28 I wish the folks involved would take a long hard look at the history of colonization on Earth: it’s not in the top 10 things we got right. Or top 100,000. No archaeologists or anthropologists are currently consulting for any of the various groups planning the Mars voyages. The language being used—the very idea that we “must” leave Earth to survive29—is laughable to archaeologists. We’ve survived here for over 200,000 years, and that’s a decent track record.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t attempt to travel to Mars. But the wording of the venture matters. Our world is the only one we’ve ever known, and giving up so irresponsibly on our home is not something our ancestors would have understood. Nature is resilient. Fish stocks can return with well-managed protected areas,30 and forests can be regrown.31 There’d be less plastic in the sea if we removed it and stopped producing it.
As you’ve seen in this book, humans can be resilient, too. Who could have predicted in 1940 that Germany would, some 80 years later, be a beacon for diversity and inclusion, and an upstanding power in Europe, holding things together? Eight decades is not long in the timescale of human history.
From another perspective, our hands have gone from holding stone tools to smartphones in less than 10,000 years, a fraction of our existence as humans. The leaps our species has taken should give us hope for the future. More than that, we have a good chance of thriving, if only we unlock our great human potential.
Archaeologists function as cultural memory hoarders, the khaki-wearing bards singing the songs of cultures long absorbed back into the earth, hoping people pause for a moment and listen. Digging is, for me, a great act of rebellion, against capitalism, the patriarchy, you name it. Because at our core, archaeologists believe that everyone in the past is worth learning about: rich and poor, mighty and weak.
It’s not about skin color or whether someone was an immigrant or grew up on the wrong side of the donkey tracks. It’s about the human story. By the way, archaeologists are terrible gossips; we take fragments of data and spin them into grand tales of love, power, and political intrigue. Right or wrong, maybe we have added another footnote to the history of humanity.
The main challenge we face is that we are at risk of losing so much, when there is clearly so much left to find and protect.
11
Stolen Heritage
Imagine a beautiful painted pot on display in a museum. Warm golden lights bathe it, bringing out subtle blue and red painted patterns. You cannot help but admire it; you want to know more. You read the label: “Maya ceramic vessel; Central America. Part of the Henry Smith Collection. 9.201.1993.” It’s unhelpful, to say the least.
The curators might have classified the object as Maya because it looked similar to other vessels on display from excavations. But this object, which came to the museum through a bequest from a collector, has no context, no relationship to its site or connection to the assemblage of other remains that might have been found around it—in fact, no information—because archaeologists did not excavate it. Looters did.
We will never know if it represents a rare vessel type, used only during royal coronations, an ordinary family’s most beloved possession, or a sacred item brought out a few times a year for important festivals. The ancient artifact becomes objectified, a beautiful, lifeless thing with no meaning or purpose behind it. Its cultural role in everyday life is lost forever. Getting people to understand the true value of an object is a Herculean task. Perhaps academics are to blame for writing too many arcane articles that exclude a larger audience. Maybe television turns that objectifying eye too readily on the glamorous golden things. But it is terribly hard to get people to recognize the difference between financial and cultural value.
Even humble objects in our own homes can have higher intrinsic value than their price tag. Greg and I have a beautiful painting of a young Armenian girl wearing a white headscarf on our dining room wall. For more than 50 years, it hung in my grandparents’ dining room. The figure shared every meal, heard every family discussion, watched small children grow up and have children of their own, and eventually saw one of those children become a parent. The Armenian girl was the only one in the room when my grandmother passed away. The painter never became famous, and the work has no monetary value on the market, but to my family, and to me in particular, it is priceless.
Assessing the value of ancient objects is, admittedly, difficult, and it might be overenthusiastic or, at least, impractical to say every ancient object is priceless. Likewise, even jaded academics are not immune to the allure of beautiful things. King Tutankhamun’s death mask is a top item on the list of any visitor to Egypt, and I, too, always make a beeline there to say hello. The precious materials might be an attention grabber, but the object represents so much more than a shimmering mask. It’s a symbol of archaeological potential—of everything out there waiting to be found.
But antiquities in private collections bring a different dimension to the concept of “value.” Some might be treasured family heirlooms, and some owners might readily offer them for public display in museums or special exhibitions; but some collectors simply covet them. They cannot let go, they must have more, and they do not care who suffers so they can get that fix.
Friends and colleagues who have visited homes filled with antiquities tell me that the owners like nothing more than to show them off and brag about how they got them. Acquiring those things is like killing during a hunt—with overpowered weaponry and minimal skill—and the artifacts are then displayed in the same way such a hunter would pose for ghastly, tacky photos or show off mounted animal trophies. Perhaps the owners know the specific place of origin of the objects, but more often than not they have only the country or region. And they do not care.
Looted tomb near Giza [PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR]
From Ancient Sites to eBay
Today there’s a new chapter in the history of collecting antiquities. Thanks to eBay and similar websites, anyone can own a scarab for a few hundred dollars. I just typed in “antiquities,” and 55,000 objects appeared. Clicking on “Egyptian antiquities” narrowed that to 5,000. On the first page of fifty objects, half of which dealers market as “real,” I would say maybe two or three seemed like sure bets. Some looked to be close copies, as if artisans had created them in the presence of originals but botched some details. An expert could spot the fakes. Most suckers with a cr
edit card wouldn’t have a clue.
I have mixed feelings about this after speaking to the eBay team. I asked if they could remove the antiquities from their website, since any real objects probably represent looted goods. They told me, “We can do it, but those guys are the lowest-hanging fruit. You want to find the real bad guys. Go after them first.”
Looting has a long history. King Tut’s burial party helped themselves to unguents from jars—thick, perfumed skin creams, which, unlike items bearing the king’s name, could not be tracked. Howard Carter and his team, the archaeologists who found Tut’s tomb, saw hand-scoop imprints in the unguent vessels.1
Even so, walking across a heavily looted site breaks my heart. Where the ground is strewn with human remains, mummy wrappings, and recently broken pottery from looters, I know we have lost part of history forever. Each bone, each piece of mummy, comes from a formerly living, breathing, laughing, loving human being, no different from you and me. How would you feel if the final resting places of your loved ones were desecrated like this?
In addition to the obvious, physical destruction that looters leave behind, they may also do irreparable damage to modern societies. In many places today, groups identify with ancient cultures, and even revere them. People may be proud of their associations and celebrate religious and cultural traditions going back thousands of years; looting and site destruction can erase irreplaceable cultural memories. When hundreds of sites are attacked, it is as if vandals have burned entire libraries of books about that culture.
Some of these issues hit very close to home. In the United States, looting in the Southwest is connected to the growing methamphetamine and opioid epidemics. American looters can be highly organized and opportunistic: after the US government shutdown of January 2018, messages appeared on metal-detecting LISTSERVs within hours, essentially saying, “C’mon, boys, no one will be watching. Let’s go loot Civil War sites.”2
Riots in Your Neighborhood
My career found a new focus after the events of the Arab Spring. The images we saw livestreaming from Egypt on Al Jazeera English were almost impossible to process. If there is a hustling, bustling, thrumming, never-stopping center of the universe, Tahrir Square in the middle of Cairo wins that accolade. It always felt like home to us. Around its edges, in clockwise order, sit the Egyptian Museum; a series of cheap and cheerful hotels favored by archaeologists; the American Research Center in Egypt, an archaeological organization of great help to American missions; and the Nile Hilton, now Ritz-Carlton, whose food court used to double as a day-off HQ for Egyptologists.
By January 25, 2011, hundreds of thousands of people had poured into the square, chanting, raising flags, calling for freedom from the corruption of the 30-year-long presidency of Hosni Mubarak. We stayed glued to our computer for days. Then we woke that Saturday to news that the Egyptian Museum had been looted.
I broke down in tears, assuming the worst. I had proposed to my husband in that museum, on February 29, 2004, amid the most beautiful Egyptological treasures on the planet. Unforgettable scenes of Egyptians forming a human chain around their cultural heart flooded the news: “This is no Baghdad!” they shouted, many in tears themselves.
It took hours for the news to arrive that the thugs had left most of the museum untouched. The break-in was a desultory smash and grab, and in the following days, hardworking curators recovered most of the stolen pieces.
Relief. For a brief 24 hours. Then the rumors raced around the internet about large-scale looting at Giza and Saqqara.3 I joined a global email LISTSERV with several hundred archaeologists, all of whom had a lot of thoughts about the situation in Egypt. Unhelpful emails multiplied, leveling accusations against my Egyptian colleagues for not doing enough to stop the looting during an ongoing revolution. All the while, those same colleagues were risking their lives to fight off looters at sites across Egypt.
I wrote an email telling everyone that the only way to know if looting had affected sites would be to examine before-and-after satellite imagery. Fortunately, that prompted a more welcome message, signed by Chris Johns, then editor-in-chief of National Geographic Magazine.
Chris asked if we could, in fact, map looting from space. I said yes. One of my colleagues, Elizabeth Stone at Stony Brook University in New York, had pioneered the use of high-resolution satellite imagery to document looting in southern Iraq following the US invasion in 2003.4 I told Chris I already had data from 2010 to use as the before imagery.
The National Geographic Society, working with the GeoEye Foundation, helped purchase new data from Saqqara, taken just two weeks after the revolution began. When I pored over the two data sets, the signs were devastating: clear bulldozer tracks, just to the northeast of Djoser’s Pyramid complex, evidence of recent, brazen looting. I sent the images back to National Geographic, which was the beginning of a collaborative relationship focused on the archaeology and cultural heritage of Egypt.
Before and after high-resolution satellite images of looting near Saqqara [IMAGES COURTESY DIGITALGLOBE]
That May, the Antiquities Coalition invited me to Egypt, to accompany a group of former diplomats and government officials, including one of President George W. Bush’s press secretaries. I had prepared a briefing dossier to share with the Egyptian government, updated with new imagery taken a few days before I set out, which showed the increase in looting at important sites like Saqqara and Dashur.
We went to the parliament building for a meeting with Egypt’s ministers of tourism, foreign relations, antiquities, and foreign affairs. Walking into the room, I was overwhelmed. The ceiling seemed to rise a hundred feet in the air, with cascading ornate drapery, and the press and the entourage of each minister swarmed beneath it all. I had zero diplomatic experience and assumed I’d be at the kids’ table.
We sat down opposite the ministers, all of whom had copies of my dossier. Deborah Lehr, head of the Antiquities Coalition, who was leading our delegation, thanked everyone, set the stage … and then turned to me, saying, “Now Sarah will be discussing the results of her satellite research and the implications for cultural heritage in Egypt.”
Oh.
I did the only thing I knew how to do: be an Egyptologist.
No one said a thing as I walked them through the stages of looting at some of Egypt’s most well-known sites. Frightening images with undeniable meaning. People were grave, concerned, and still in shock from what had happened to their country. They listened, hard.
I was too terrified to properly process the raised eyebrows when I did my best to thank everyone there profusely in Arabic. I wondered if I had violated every rule of international diplomacy. But then there were big smiles and lots of thumbs-up from the ministerial entourages. One lady added, “You sounded like a country bumpkin, but we all understood you.” (My Arabic is better now, though I have improved mainly in the areas of dirty jokes and insults.)
Those meetings changed my life. I knew, of course, the role of archaeology and history in global politics, but to experience them firsthand and have a role in shaping them—I had parachuted out of the ivory tower and into a bigger, scarier world.
The Story Grows
National Geographic’s support of this project grew into funding for the analysis of looting trends across all of Egypt. I hired a team to help with the data processing. When you’re faced with 12 years of data across a country more than 700,000 square kilometers in area, with thousands of archaeological sites, you need your Avengers to assemble. We used mainly Google Earth open-access data for the project, since commercial satellite data would have cost us over $40 million.
In a six-month period, looking at high-resolution imagery from 2002 to 2013, we mapped over 200,000 looting pits.5 They are easy to detect once you know what to look for: a dark square, surrounded by a doughnut of earth left by the looters in their search for lucrative tomb shafts, which can be as deep as 10 meters. The pits average about a meter in diameter, which means they’re easy to detect on the imagery. Among
the thousands of sites we examined, we found evidence for looting or site destruction at 279. A heavy pall hung in the air as my team and I worked away on the data and witnessed the ongoing erasure of history.
The most fascinating story emerged from the post-2008 data. Looting during the 2002–2008 period occurred at a constant rate. We expected to see the big jump in 2011. But science has a way of upsetting neat, convenient conclusions. Looting got exponentially worse in 2009, after the global recession. Yes, the looting moved quickly in 2011, but only after the upward trend had already started; it is not who holds the local political reins, but the global economy, that does the driving.
We crunched the numbers to try to determine future trends. Our conclusion is that if nothing is done, by 2040, all of Egypt’s sites will be affected by looting.6
Our global archaeological heritage has a serious problem, one that cannot be fixed with anything other than a well-planned and thoughtful long game. If archaeologists and other experts do nothing to combat these issues, most ancient sites in the Middle East alone will disappear in the next 20 to 25 years.7
Hope or Hopelessness
Prior to this, you have read so many stories about discovery and retelling history. If you care about the value of future discovery, this chapter hurts to read, because you now know exactly what is at stake from these losses. Part of me is sorry I set you up for this, but mostly I’m not. Every site my team and I find makes us ask what we missed, and what else might be gone.
Sometimes light appears at the end of the tunnel. My colleagues who map looting have testified before the US Congress and the State Department and shared satellite imagery that shows the ongoing destruction committed by terrorists and international criminals. Katharyn Hanson, a remote-sensing Wonder Woman who works as a Fellow with the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute,8 contributed her expertise, and as a result, the 2015–16 Congress passed the Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act (HR 1493). It advocated for the creation of a cultural property coordination committee and imposed import restrictions on Syrian archaeological materials.