That probably started me off on a career where I wanted to work with other human beings. I think that really helped to prepare me for working with other human beings, and it made me really confident in my own skin. You need to be really confident around people of all ages and backgrounds because you never know who you're going to meet in a restaurant. I think that really helped me to develop my people person skills. I realized very quickly that I could get tips because people thought it was really adorable. It's going to sound like they violated labor laws, but they didn't. From childhood until when I was in high school, I helped them seat people in the restaurant.

My parents were in the restaurant business. What was the first early adulthood job that set you on the track towards remote sensing and satellite archaeology? Inverse spoke to Parcak about the forces that shaped her career path, the influence of a few crucial mentors, and how she solves problems on the ground. That entails a $1 million dollar grant she used to construct a citizen science platform called, where anyone can search for archaeological sites using satellite images. Parcak is also a founder of and a professor at the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama Birmingham, the author of Archaeology from Space, a 2013 Senior Ted Fellow, and the recipient of the 2016 Ted Prize. She's found fingerprints of the Viking world and the former Roman Empire. Her discoveries include 17 pyramids, 3,100 potential settlements, and 1,000 tombs in Egypt.

Parcak is the world's foremost space archaeologist, known as a 'modern-day Indiana Jones.' She uses satellites to find ancient cities, tombs, and archaeological sites. We are breaking, as a society, but also we've been broken for 400 years. “What we find in archaeology is broken, and we have to make it whole again. “I tend to think cyclically, because of archaeology, about the nature of these things – about how empires rise and fall,” she tells Inverse. She can see current predicaments from a bird's-eye view. However, unlike many, Parcak studies the ruins of past civilizations.

Parcak, like many Americans, was still in the process of sorting through feelings of grief. Inverse spoke to archaeologist Sarah Parcak the day after rioters stormed the U.S.

Sarah parcak