i was a child growing up in maine one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of maine because my parents told me it would bring me luck but you know these shells they 're hard to find they 're covered in sand they 're difficult to see
however overtime i got used to looking for them i started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them
this grew into a passion for finding things a love for the past and archaeology and eventually when i started studying egyptology i realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn 't enough because all of the sudden in egypt
my beach had grown from a tiny beach in maine to one eight hundred miles long next to the nile
and my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities this is really what brought me to using satellite imagery for trying to map the past i knew that i had to see differently so i want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared
this is a site located in the eastern egyptian delta called bendix and the site visibly appears brown but when we use the infrared
and we process it all of the sudden
missing for thousands of years itjtawy was ancient egypt 's capital for over four hundred years at a period of time called the middle kingdom about four thousand years ago the site is located in the faiyum of egypt and site is really important because in the middle kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient egyptian art
architecture and religion egyptologists have always known the site of itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it indicated within the red circles here
but somewhere within this massive flood plane this area is huge it 's four miles by three miles in size the nile used to flow right next to the city of itjtawy and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east it covered over the city
so how do you find a buried city in a vast landscapefinding it randomly would be the equivalent
of locating a needle in a haystack blindfolded wearing baseball mitts
so what we did is we used nasa topography data to map out the landscape very subtle changes we started to be able to see where the nile used to flow but you can see in more detail and even more interesting this very slight raised area seen within the circle up here which we thought could possibly be the location
we also found work stone
these are the stones that were used so we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the middle kingdom at this site we also have evidence of an elite jewelers workshop showing that whatever was there was a very important city
so i wanted to end with my favorite quote from the middle kingdom it was probably written at the city of itjtawy four thousand years ago
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