Combating Looting from Space
On any given day thousands of looted archeological artifacts are offered for sale on the black market, ancient treasures stolen from historical sites. To try to cut off supply, archeologists exert pressure on governments to do more to help in the battle against smugglers.
Now they have come up with a fresh approach – open innovation and the crowd.
Space archeologist Sarah Parcak, the 2016 TED prize winner and a team of researchers have developed GlobalXplorer. This is an online platform that uses crowdsourcing and makes use of satellite imagery to record new archeological sites and map looting activity. The information will then be shared with government authorities and other archeologists.
Searching for Signs of Looting
Members of the public who sign up to take part can search hundreds of thousands of DigitalGlobe satellite images looking for evidence of looting and for sites that may be hidden under dense cloud cover.
The first country chosen for the project is Peru, because of its many archeological sites and because the country’s government is open to new ways of protecting them. The website is written in both English and Spanish, so Spanish speaking volunteers can participate as well.
Before volunteers get down to business on the open innovation project, there’s a short tutorial on how to identify signs of looting from just looking at satellite images.
Already, the work has thrown up some results: “We have already begun to find previously unknown sites,” said Parcak during a TED talk. “Unfortunately, we’ve also begun to uncover large-scale looting at sites.”
For more information about the project, click on this link and watch the video below.
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