Satellite-based monitoring of archaeological looting in Peru

Abstract

Illegal excavations represent one of the main risk factors which affect the archaeological heritage all over the world, in particular in those countries, from Southern America to Middle East, where the surveillance on site is little effective and time consuming and the aerial surveillance is non practicable due to military or political restrictions. In such contexts satellite remote sensing offers a suitable chance to monitor this phenomenon. The chapter deals with the results obtained on some areas of Cahuachi (Peru) by using a time series of very high resolution satellite images. The rate of success in detecting changes related to archaeological looting has been fruitfully improved by adopting a semiautomatic approach based on spatial autocorrelation.