GX uses state of the art geospatial tools to provide new solutions to global cultural heritage issues, launching its online citizen science satellite archaeology crowdsourcing platform ( in Peru in January 2017. Using satellite imagery, crowdsourcing, 3D mapping, and machine learning, GX aims to transform the field of archaeology to make it more accessible and open to archaeologists and people across the globe. When we look back through the millennia, we can see that our hopes and dreams and challenges really haven’t changed much.”Ĭlick here to learn more about becoming a GlobalXplorer°.Globalxplorer (GX) seeks to protect and preserve the world’s cultural heritage through innovative technologies. “Humanity has been down many difficult paths, and we’ve handled them with great resilience and creativity.
“Right now we could all use a healthy dose of understanding that we’re all the same species,” Parcak says.
Just as Hiram Bingham’s photos of Machu Picchu sparked a movement to discover and preserve archaeological sites at the turn of the 20th century, Parcak hopes GlobalXplorer will help catalyze a modern age of discovery and preservation-one that could give hope and perspective in these challenging times.
#Global xplorer series#
A recent series of photos taken by DigitalGlobe-which is providing satellite images of Peru for the GlobalXplorer° project-showed a massive fortress thousands of years old on the Kazakhstan steppe.īut Parcak’s vision is bigger than any single discovery that her community of armchair archaeologists might make. This past June a consortium of archaeologists in Cambodia used airborne lasers to discover the jungle-covered remains of what was possibly the biggest pre-industrial city on Earth. In Egypt, Parcak and her colleagues used satellite imagery to find a long-buried city that was touted in ancient hieroglyphs. Parcak cautions that the project is still a “grand experiment,” but remote imaging has already led to big discoveries. “Archaeology can make a tremendous contribution to poorer communities if we can help them build livelihoods as well as save sites.” "Grand Experiment" “The trade in stolen antiquities is often driven by economic desperation, so we need to provide an incentive to local people to protect nearby riches,” says SPI executive director Lawrence Coben. SPI will also help local residents who live near significant archaeological sites develop business and artisan skills so they can benefit from tourism. As crowd-sourced data comes in, teams will be dispatched to investigate select sites and take action as needed, after consulting with Peru’s Ministry of Culture.
Parcak has partnered with acclaimed Peruvian archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer Luís Jaime Castillo of the Sustainable Preservation Initiative (SPI) to coordinate on-the-ground activities in Peru. The tiles do not contain any location reference or coordinate information. The high-resolution satellite images are broken into tens of millions of small tiles and displayed to users in a random order without the ability to navigate or pan out. Preventing looters from finding new sites was central to building the GlobalXplorer° platform. Advanced users will have access to images that reveal differences in vegetation health-a clue to what lies hidden in the soil, such as buried ruins. After a short tutorial (in English or Spanish), budding archaeologists can search through “tiles,” or snapshots of the Earth’s surface, looking for hints of looting, construction, or other encroachment, as well as signs of ruins that modern archaeologists have yet to find. The inaugural online expedition of GlobalXplorer° will take participants to Peru via high-resolution satellite images shot from 435 miles above the Earth.
We want to find out more about other people, and about ourselves and our past.” See Peru-from Space “But we’re all born explorers, curious and intrinsically interested in other humans. “Most people don’t get to make scientific contributions or discoveries in their everyday lives,” Parcak says. Winners use the $1 million prize money to invest in a project of their choice. Parcak won the 2016 TED Prize, awarded each year to an innovator with an audacious and creative vision for global change. Parcak, a National Geographic Fellow and founding director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama, is enlisting an army of amateur archaeologists to study satellite images for signs of looting and destruction and spur the discovery of archaeological sites.
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