The Race to Record the Ruins
As land values rise, Peru’s ancient sites are under threat from development. To respond, Peru is creating a drone air force to map, monitor and safeguard its endangered treasures.
Video Credit By Jimmy Chalk and Erica Berenstein on Publish Date August 13, 2014. Image CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York TimesCHEPÉN, Peru — A small remote-controlled helicopter buzzed over ancient hilltop ruins here, snapping hundreds of photographs. Below, stone walls built more than a thousand years ago by the Moche civilization gave way to a grid of adobe walls put up only recently by what officials said were land speculators.
“This site is threatened on every side,” said Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, Peru’s vice minister of cultural heritage as he piloted the drone aircraft.
Archaeologists around the world, who have long relied on the classic tools of their profession, like the trowel and the plumb bob, are now turning to the modern technology of drones to defend and explore endangered sites. And perhaps nowhere is the shift happening as swiftly as in Peru, where Dr. Castillo has created a drone air force to map, monitor and safeguard his country’s ancient treasures.
Drones mark “a before and after in archaeology,” said Dr. Castillo, who is also a prominent archaeologist and one of a dozen experts who will outline the use of drones at a conference in San Francisco next year.
In remote northwestern New Mexico, archaeologists are using drones outfitted with thermal-imaging cameras to track the walls and passages of a 1,000-year-old Chaco Canyon settlement, now buried beneath the dirt.
In the Middle East, researchers have employed them to guard against looting.
“Aerial survey at the site is allowing for the identification of new looting pits and determinations of whether any of the looters’ holes had been revisited,” said Morag Kersel, an archaeologist from DePaul University in Chicago who is part of a team using drones in Jordan and Israel.
Peru, with its stunning concentration of archaeological riches, is suddenly fertile ground to try out this new technology. The country is becoming a research hot spot as archaeologists in the Middle East and elsewhere find their work interrupted by unrest.
But in Peru they encounter another kind of conflict. Here they struggle to protect the country’s archaeological heritage from squatters and land traffickers, who often secure property through fraud or political connections to profit from rising land values. Experts say hundreds, perhaps thousands of ancient sites are endangered by such encroachment.
The drones can address the problem, quickly and cheaply, by providing bird’s-eye views of ruins that can be converted into 3-D images and highly detailed maps.
The maps are then used to legally register the protected boundaries of sites, a kind of landmarking that can be cited in court to prevent development or to punish those who damage ruins by building anyway.
“While various scholars are utilizing drones in their individual investigations, no other country is systematically using drones to manage and protect their sites,” said Lawrence Coben, founder of the Sustainable Preservation Initiative, a nonprofit organization providing economic opportunities to poor communities in which archaeological sites are located. Encroachment has become a particular concern in cities like Lima or Cuzco, near Machu Picchu, the Inca citadel, where land values have risen steadily as the population increases and the economy booms. Many Peruvians were shocked last year when workers using heavy machinery illegally demolished a 4,000-year-old pyramid in Lima to make way for possible development.
“Lima has grown to a point where the only land left is archaeological land,” said Dr. Castillo, who is also a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
Though his work is focused on the deep past, Dr. Castillo is fascinated by gadgets and new technology. He began experimenting with drones about two years ago, buying a $100 one from the Sharper Image. Now he has a squadron of eight, all miniature helicopters that cost about $1,500 to $20,000. He hopes to soon add 20 more.
The drones, he said, “solve the first riddle of archaeology.”
“Finally you can fly whenever you want to, wherever you want to, in any angle, for anything you want and get the great picture you always thought you should take,” he said.
Dr. Castillo’s eureka moment occurred in 2012, while teaching in Sweden, where researchers were working with a powerful Russian-made computer program that could meld hundreds of photographs into a 3-D composite image. Dr. Castillo realized that by feeding his drone photographs into the program, he could produce incredibly detailed and clear 3-D images of ancient temples, fortifications and burial sites.
When asked last year to become a deputy culture minister with jurisdiction over archaeology, he brought his fledgling air force with him, using the drones in the cities but also in more remote areas like this one, known as Cerro Chepén, a sprawling site on the northern coast of Peru that dates to about A.D. 850 and the late stages of the Moche civilization. While the immense stone walls here may not be as sophisticated as those at some later sites like Machu Picchu, they are still impressive.
