You're listening to shortwave from MPR.

One of the biggest challenges in archaeology is knowing where to start digging.

I mean, there are tens of millions of square kilometers of Earth to explore.

Sarah Parkheck is one of the pioneers in a new field of study trying to solve that challenge.

So I tell people it's kind of like fancy, super fancy Google Earth.

It's called space archaeology, although it's kind of more like archaeology from space.

If you think of, say, like a Roman villa somewhere in England and it's beneath a field

and you just have the foundations of the villa left, so bits of, bits of stone.

You can't see those bits of stone from above the ground,

but you can see the plants growing there.

Well, the crops or the plants that are growing on top of the foundations

are going to have stunted growth because the roots are going down and they're hitting stone.

So maybe the plant life would be a little shorter or a little weaker over that stone.

Settle changes like that would be hard to spot, unless you had a good view.

This exact scenario played out in the summer of 2018.

When there was so much of England that was experiencing drought.

Parts of Europe baked in out of the ordinary warms fell this summer,

but there were just hundreds and hundreds of archaeological features that popped up all over the landscape

because it was so dry.

Ghostly outlines of a civilization passed emerging from the moisture starve landscape.

Those outlines are called crop marks.

And in the UK and the summer of 2018, they were all over the place.

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