Satellite-Based Monitoring of Archaeological Looting in Peru

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.