 In this frigid weather, please allow me to take you to a much warmer time and place. 18 years ago, I was on the plane flying into Cairo for the first time. I was lucky to be seated on the side of the plane where I could look out the window and looking down, I saw what I'd been dreaming about since I was a little girl at the pyramids. I couldn't help myself. I had to hit my Walkman that kind of dates when I first went, and I played the theme song from Indiana Jones. You know, it was 100% Hollywood, but that sense of spirit and adventure and excitement is something that I'd felt since I was five or six years old, and I started watching it almost every Friday night on our VHS. So, it's that great sense of discovery and understanding who we are as human beings, where we've come from, that we are all on the same great human journey that I'm so passionate about, and I'm so passionate about sharing it with the world, and especially today when there seems to be more that divides us than ever before. We need archaeology to show us that walls don't work, that we all share the same great story, that we all struggle, that we're all creative and that we're all resilient. So, I want to talk to you a little bit about what I do. So, I use satellite imagery to map and model ancient landscapes. The fun term is space archaeologists. It means that I use both NASA and high resolution satellite imagery and process the imagery using different parts of the light spectrum and algorithms to make completely invisible features pop out. I collaborate with Digital Globe and NASA. There are many of my colleagues that are doing this work around the world. I've been very lucky to work both across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, the North Atlantic, and now in South America. And my colleagues and I found so many amazing things around the world everywhere we look. Sites are bigger. There are hundreds to thousands of more features than we ever thought could exist. So, I want to bring you to Romania. If there are any Romanians in the audience, I apologize, I'm going to mispronounce the name of this site. It's a site of Sarmasa Gutsa Regia. It was the ancient Dacian capital in the Carpathian mountains. So, it was inhabited about 2,000 years ago. And the Emperor Trajan decided that he wanted to take over the site because there was wonderful natural resources, so gold and lead. And we have a problem, as you can see. Part of the site is sticking out of the mountaintop, but the rest of it is covered in trees. So, when this happens, we can't use standard optical satellite imagery. We use a technology called light art, which stands for light detection and ranging. It's a sensor system that's flown on an airplane and it sends down hundreds of thousands of pulse beams of light that allow you to create a point cloud model of the landscape, which is what you see here, and it allows you to peel away overlaying vegetation to get an elevation model of what's on the ground. And what we did at the site was this. So, you see the before and the after. And what you can see, the central part of the site that's exposed, but even more interesting, is a large feature running around the site, which is the actual ditch and wall feature, and this shows us how the Emperor Trajan was both able to take over the site as well as maintain control of it over time. Now, if we can find this site looking in one place in the world, can you imagine what's left to find that's going to help tell the story of us and who we are and where we've come from? But unfortunately, as you all know, especially since 2011, we've witnessed horrific destruction both in the Middle East, in North Africa, and in so many other parts of the world, both with ISIL, of course with climate change and urbanization. So many sites have been threatened. So, my team and I decided that we were going to study what happened to Egypt. So, we used open source high resolution satellite imagery from Egypt from 2002 to 2013. We mapped looting at 267 sites and found over 200,000 looting pits. And you can see all the dark holes with circles around them. Those are looting pits. Looters go in, they dig these holes. A lot of them represent tombs or houses. They take the goods and then they're sold or hidden away to sell in future. And we found something really interesting. We put all the data together and we found that contrary to popular opinion, looting did not actually get significantly worse starting in 2011 after the spring, which is what most people thought, but in 2009 after the global recession. This shows we can use big data to answer and really question a lot of assumptions that have been made by scientists. But more importantly, it shows that looting is fundamentally an economic issue and one we can only understand through this big data. And the other thing what we did was, of course, a projection model. And if we do nothing, all of Egypt's sites will be affected by looting by 2040. I work closely with the Egyptian government. They're doing extraordinary work protecting Egypt's sites. This is really a worst case scenario, but it just shows you what it could be like. And the story is the same for so many countries around the world. I've been very lucky to partner with Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities on a joint mission at an archaeological site called Lished. Dates to around 3,800 years ago. It was Egypt's middle kingdom capital. This is ancient Egypt's great Renaissance period of great art and architecture and literature. Unfortunately, the site was very badly affected by looting after 2011. You can see in this image over here, there are many, many hundreds of looting pits. There were over 800 tombs that were looted at the site of Lished, which is one of the many reasons I decided I wanted to work there. So I am just back from the field. I think I've still got sand on my shirt just there a few weeks ago with our second season. It went incredibly well. We're very lucky starting in December of 2015. We found a tomb of a general and overseer of the treasury called Intef. Intef was a very important chap. You can see his tomb here and my workforce working very hard. And because this is a joint mission, it means that I have an Egyptian co-director and large numbers of Egyptian team members and scientists. It's such a joy to work there. The site's amazing. So I mentioned the middle kingdom is this period of great art and architecture and literature. And what we have been finding at the site is amazing. And I want to share with you some of the incredible discoveries that we took out of the ground just a few weeks ago. Before I do that, I just want to acknowledge my extraordinary workforce. I work with about 60 to 70 Egyptians. At this site, we've been able to stop the looting, working with the Egyptian government. We've put in a lighting system. We've put in doors on the tombs. We hire year-round guards. And of course, the most important thing is the great connections that we've made to the local communities. We pay them a fair wage. We work with them. We teach them about the site. And it's been a wonderful partnership. So on this side, you can see half of a figurine of the goddess Sekhmet made out of finance, which was just such a cool thing to find. We have cats. It was really cool. And then over here, if there are any Avengers fans in the audience, it's dancing baby Groot. Kind of a fun thing to find. But we found really amazing things. It was a great season. But most importantly, and the thing about which I'm most proud from this season, is we ran a field school for five young Egyptian inspectors from the Ministry of Antiquities. We taught them about excavations, survey, remote sensing, cultural heritage. You can see these extraordinary young men and women. I'm very lucky to have permission from the Egyptian government to work at one site. These young men and women are the real heroes and heroines of Egypt's cultural heritage. Each one of them told me the most extraordinary stories about how they risked their lives to protect sites in Egypt. There are hundreds and hundreds of young men and women like this in Egypt and they deserve to be celebrated more. We're hoping to collaborate very closely with the Ministry of Antiquities to provide more opportunities for these extraordinary young men and women in future working at the site and in other places. We've heard so much bigotry and racism from the U.S. and Europe against Muslims. And we must show true stories of collaboration and friendship with our Muslim colleagues. And I'm going to be showing images like this certainly a lot more for the next few years and telling the stories of these extraordinary men and women, my very dear friends. So what do we do? What do we do about all this looting? This is really a challenge. It's not an easy problem to fix. You can't wave your wand and make it go away. We have to look beyond economic reasons. We have to connect local communities to archaeological sites. And ultimately we have to think about this in terms of a three pronged approach. We have to work with local communities. We have to provide them with economic opportunities. We have to have new international laws to cut off the illegal importation of antiquities all over the country. We need to think more creatively about potential solutions. And we have to play a long game. This isn't something that we're going to fix next week or next year in five years. We have to think about how we can influence future generations so that we never see groups of people blowing up temples and tombs again. I've unfortunately had many chances to walk around these tombs that have been freshly looted, human bone crunching on the ground. Many of these tombs have been intact. The material from these tombs can often be sold in international art markets for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. We don't have a real sense of the amount that's been taken. It's hard to assess the value to it. This is really one of the reasons why I made my wish at TED last year to create a global army of citizen scientists to help us discover and protect archaeological sites around the world. I'm very excited to announce this is Global Explorer. We're going to be launching the site on January 30th, so in two weeks. So please go to globalexplore.org to sign up, get your kids and grandkids and friends and family involved. What we've done is we've developed an online citizen science crowdsourcing platform to allow anyone and everyone across the globe to help us find, map and protect archaeological sites. I'm very excited to say that we're starting in Peru. We're working very closely with the Peruvian ministries of culture and tourism. I've gotten to go down a few times and meet with folks there. It's extraordinary. Of course, we all know about Machu Picchu, but the culture of Peru is so rich. We have the Chimu, we have the Moche, we have the Inca and so many other extraordinary ancient cultures. The Peruvian government also has done amazing work with a drone napping program. They're very open to technology. So what you see here is the platform itself. We want to make it fun, easy, and we want to get people involved right away with jumping into exploring. Of course, we're launching this in Spanish as well as in English. You can see there's a countdown clock on the bottom. We want to make this feel like an expedition. You only have a certain number of days to participate. And what we're most excited about, I think, is that we're gamifying the platform. In other words, as people go on and they start to use the platform, they're going to get rich rewards. So you'll actually level up. You'll proceed from mapping looting to mapping encroachment to mapping new sites. And you'll get to learn more about Peru's rich history. We also want this to be incredibly transparent. So you'll see the number of people that are involved. You'll see how many sites have been explored. Here are the women of Pachacama. We're partnering with the Sustainable Preservation Initiative on the ground in Peru to connect with local communities. I should say this project is being done in partnership with TED, National Geographic, and Digital Globe. They're all helping to provide development as well as content for the platform. Here's what it will look like. Now, one of the questions I most often ask is, aren't you afraid people are going to get on your platform, find something, and then go loot it? Fair question, except there's no GPS information and you can't see where you are on a map. We basically treated archaeological sites like human patients and we've completely obscured their location. Now, if someone wants to, you know, look and maybe they found something and spend the 10,000 hours they'd need on Google Earth looking at the tree of the whole country, there's not much that I can do, but we've certainly taken every step possible to protect the data. The other thing that we're doing is we are making sure that the sites and features that people find as part of the platform only go, either to the Ministry of Culture or to qualified, collaborating partners and archaeology. So this data is only going to be shared with experts. So you'll start off mapping looting. You can see it's pretty easy to use. There'll be a tutorial that you'll take as soon as you go on the websites. You'll start with looting. You'll move on to encroachment. This is in partnership with UNESCO. There are a number of sites in Peru that UNESCO monitors. We'll be getting high resolution satellite imagery, essentially from 400 miles in space. You can zoom in to a resolution of 0.3 meters, just 11 inches. The resolution is extraordinary and it's only going to get better and better over time. So we can't quite zoom in from space yet and see a pot shirt, but just wait a few years. I think we're going to be able to. And next you'll get to find previously unknown ancient sites. So the more time you spend on the platform, the better you'll get. You'll be getting feedback. You'll be getting scored and ranked. The other thing, and this is in partnership with National Geographic, the more time you spend on the site, the more you're going to learn about the archaeology of Peru. So you won't just level up and go from a wayfinder to a pathfinder all the way to level 10. Space archaeologist, of course, every couple of days, will be releasing these rich content packets on the site. So initially you'll be learning about the sites of Peru, the great explorers in Peru, of course, focusing on Peruvian archaeologists as well. So the more time you spend on the site, the more you'll know about the archaeology of Peru, which will make you a better searcher on the platform. The best part, though, is when as soon as people find these sites, we'll be giving them to archaeologists, as I mentioned, and they'll be taking the world with them. They'll be taking you all with them as they explore these sites on the ground using Periscope, using Google, Google Hangouts, using YouTube. So obviously not in a secure way, but essentially they'll be rewarding the people who helped to find the sites with these new discoveries as they're being made, which I don't think has ever been done before. So this is a big experiment, but we're really, really hoping to engage the world in a new manner of exploration. So why? Why would we do this? What is the point? Well, I've spent so much time working in Egypt and the Middle East. I've traveled all over the world. I've seen so many ancient sites under threat of destruction. And I've come to the conclusion that the only way or the best chance we have at protecting these sites for future generations is to inspire people to be a part of this great human story and give them the power to help tell it. So if you've got kids and they get to help discover sites, they'll remember that for the rest of their lives, no matter what they end up doing. And as a result, they'll always be champions of cultural heritage. And we hope to inspire a global movement to get everyone excited about exploration and discovery. Peru, by the way, is just our first country. We're hoping to launch country two later this year. Country two is going to be an app. And who knows where we're going to go after that? So if we can map a whole country in a few months, a couple countries in a year, with more and more data, with more and more people using the platform, how long will it be before we can map all the archaeological sites in the world? You know, I mentioned to Neanna Jones when I started about a year ago. I had the chance to thank someone very special for inspiring me at age five, six. Thanks to Harrison. He was so kind and so generous. We had lunch. And that showed me the power of how one person, just playing a character, could transform a whole field. So many people in my generation who do archaeology got into it because of Indiana Jones. And I was able to thank Harrison and say, you gave my field a gift. You inspired us through your passion. I know it's just a movie character. The thrill of discovery, the thrill of adventure, that inspired us. And my wish was a way of paying it forward, not just to my field, but to the world. As part of this platform, as I said, we really want to kickstart a global movement to help make people care more about the past. For me, I've been working in archaeology now for almost 20 years. Every time I put my trowel on the ground, I'm reminded of our great human resilience, our creativity, our brilliance. And we have faced so many challenges before with climate change and war and conflict and economic challenges. And we have survived. And we haven't just survived, we've thrived. Doing archaeology just simply gives me hope for humanity. And I hope now, with getting the world involved, it can make them all hopeful as well. Thank you very much.