NPR– When you think archeology, you think shovels, brushes, brooms and other time-honored tools used to uncover archeological treasures. Now a new way to peer beneath the Earth’s surface may have made an exciting find: more pyramids, buried deep under an ancient Egyptian city.

By studying infrared images taken by NASA satellites, Sarah Parcak and her team from the University of Alabama at Birmingham identified the suspected pyramids in Tanis, Egypt. The ancient city, abandoned centuries ago, is famous as the fictional home of the Lost Ark from the Indiana Jones movies. Satellite images also showed other lost structures, like tombstones and houses, buried for thousands of years.

“What these satellites do is they record light radiation that’s reflected off the surface of the Earth in different parts of the light spectrum,” Parcak explains to NPR’s Rachel Martin. “We use false color imaging to try to tease out these very subtle differences on the ground.”

Those subtle differences are an archaeologist’s clues to what might lie under a rice paddy or a city street. “You just pull back for hundreds of miles using the satellite imagery, and all of a sudden this invisible world become visible,” Parcak says. “You’re actually able to see settlements and tombs — and even things like buried pyramids — that you might not otherwise be able to see.”

What Parcak’s team actually found was 17 structures that had a similar size, shape and orientation to other pyramids in the area. Initial excavations indicate that at least two of the structures are most likely pyramids, but Parcak warns, “we’re not going to be able to say with a 100-percent certainty that they are pyramids until they’re excavated.”

Read full article and transcript of broadcast at 17 Hidden Pyramids Discovered with Satellite.

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