Hey everybody, Maddie Sifaya here. We are hard at work on some new episodes, so in the

meantime we're breaking out an old one that you might have missed. And I'll tell you

what, this episode has it all. We're talking space, radar, the search for ancient civilizations,

what else could you possibly want? And while I've got you here, if you haven't subscribed

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NPR. 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 Parkhack 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 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 in their

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, you know, so much of

of England that was experiencing drought. Parts of Europe baked in out of the ordinary

war spells 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

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