Credit: Ryan Lash/TED

Sarah Parcak helped to establish the use of satellite imagery to identify potential archaeological sites. Last year, she was awarded US$1 million from TED, the non-profit organization devoted to spreading ideas. Parcak, a remote-sensing expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, plans to use the money to fulfil her dream of creating an online portal for citizen scientists to help discover archaeological treasures.

How did you get the idea to apply satellite imaging to archaeology?

My grandfather, Harold Young, a forestry professor at the University of Maine in Orono, was a pioneer in the use of aerial photography to look at forests. He would measure tree heights and look at the health of forests that were going to be used in paper manufacturing. I wondered how to apply that technology. He had passed away by the time I was an undergraduate. I was surprised to find that aerial imaging hadn't been applied to archaeology before.

Were you the first to use this technology?

There was a cohort of about six of us working mainly in the Middle East — in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Egypt — to explore how to use satellite data, which has now helped practitioners move beyond their traditional focus on one site for an entire career. To understand sites in a broader context, it's not efficient to do work on the ground. You have to think big, look from above and follow old river courses.

How is your work changing archaeology?

I hope that I've encouraged colleagues to think of the scale of sites differently. Most recently, we discovered what may be a Viking settlement in Newfoundland, Canada. It was the first time that the technology had been used in the search for potential Norse sites. Using high-resolution satellite imagery, we found two potential sites that, when ground-truthed, yielded one likely Viking site. These techniques give you robust data that can be used to focus field efforts.

What about its use in previously studied areas?

Using high-resolution imagery, colleagues and I recently found what appeared to be a massive rectangular platform in one of the most well-surveyed archaeological zones in Petra, Jordan. Chris Tuttle, the executive director of the non-profit Council of American Overseas Research Centers in Washington DC, used drones to survey the object, and confirmed that it's massive — 80 metres by 40 metres — and dates to 2,000 years ago. Despite the site having been studied for 150 years, we missed what was probably a large ritual structure. Imagine what else we haven't found.

How did TED impact your work?

I gave a short TED talk in 2012 that aired on National Public Radio, and I was made a senior TED fellow two years later. The TED prize was very unexpected, to put it mildly. I got a message last summer saying that I'd been nominated. I filled out a 'what would your wish be' questionnaire. Then I had 18 minutes in February to make a public case for Global Xplorer, which is an online citizen-science platform to train an army of global explorers. I celebrated the work of colleagues but also gave the sense of real urgency that our field faces with so much destruction — from conflict to climate change — around the world. The prize completely changed my life. It's both an opportunity and major responsibility.

What do you expect Global Xplorer to accomplish?

Our team has scientific training and expertise; the bottleneck is the time spent searching through images. We have been scouring images to detect looting in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, and it has been one of the most depressing things ever. I believe to my core that the only chance we have to save cultural heritage sites around the world is to turn everyone into explorers. By turning people into what I call 'space archaeologists', they will develop a sense of pride and ownership in preserving our cultural heritage. I think it's one of the only chances to save the past.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.