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Let’s say you want to find some new ruins from orbit. How do you start?

Before we even start looking, we spend a lot of time looking at articles and books. What are the types of features that you might find in this area? And then we start testing different algorithms, or different remote sensing processing techniques.

It’s kind of like a detective investigation, right? We’re looking at what techniques, what satellites, what processing methods work — 999 times out of 1,000, you fail miserably, because welcome to science. But you have those one or two things that may be a hint of something. And you just keep noodling at it until you figure out what works.

You’ve been doing this for about two decades. Did you run into any opposition at the beginning?

Yeah, so I was actually known as “that satellite girl,” which is problematic on so many levels. But there was a cohort of us in the early 2000s that really started applying the technology on a much larger scale. I think the work that I and many of my colleagues did helped to open a lot of people’s eyes.

I gave a talk at a big archaeology conference about 10 years ago, and this creaky, elderly professor from Harvard, a very eminent scholar, came up to me. I thought, “Oh no, he’s going to say something.” He goes, “When I get home, I’m going to do a Google.” Like, he was going to check out Google Earth and look at his sites. I’m like, yes!

So yeah, it’s been a battle. But I think we’re there.

You’ve been a lead character in BBC documentaries, a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Fellow. Why did you want to write a book?

When you look at what books are in the archaeology section of a bookstore, it’s mostly these pseudo-archaeological books by people who write that aliens built pyramids or other outlandish theories. And that’s not what archaeology is.