| It is my sincere hope that students, professional archaeologists, archaeological researchers and all people fascinated by the potential for satellite remote sensing in archaeology will find this book useful. It is, more than anything else, a product of my thinking back to my graduate student days, and what I wish had existed then to help me get started with my work.
Before I proceed, it is important for me to explain why I have chosen to write this book in the first place. The use of satellite imagery in archaeology is a topic about which I am passionate, having spent eight years developing methods for archaeological site location in different regions of Egypt (Sinai, the Delta, and Nile Valley), teaching remote sensing courses, and (two years ago) starting a remote sensing laboratory. When I started doing research for a then undergraduate research paper in an introductory remote sensing course, I was struck by how little information could be found for general satellite remote sensing applications in archaeology. This became more apparent during my PhD years. Few papers existed that described how remote sensing could be applied to Egyptian archaeology, and no papers existed for the use of satellite remote sensing in the Nile Valley floodplain or Delta. I, quite literally, had to make it up as I went along, with all the expected pitfalls (significant trial and numerous errors) of doing something that had never been done before. Fortunately, my colleagues had written a number of excellent papers on satellite archaeology in other regions of the world, and I could rely on them for specific discussion points. Fieldwork proved to be something else entirely. Large-scale survey to locate previously unknown archaeological sites is not a significant part of Egyptian archaeology (Parcak 2008), and I had to develop a method for recording sites found during my remote sensing analysis. |
