Monitoring Cultural Heritage
CHW documents changes in the built environment of cultural landscapes using high resolution satellite imagery.
In order to monitor the condition of currently endangered sites, we task satellites to capture images throughout the year, providing a regularly updated stream of information on the physical integrity of cultural heritage sites in the region. We request imagery based on known or reported threats as well as our analysis of potential risks. Each site is examined by comparing recent captures to baseline imagery. For the purposes of this report, baseline imagery is satellite data that predates the 2020 conflict. These images are then compared with new captures from spring 2021 in order to detect and describe change at each heritage site of interest. Subsequent reports will compare newly tasked images with previously tasked images.
Evidence for damage or destruction is passed from individual monitors to the team for group evaluation. If full agreement is reached, the site is flagged as either destroyed, damaged, or threatened. Consultations are held with our partners as the team works toward a strategic response. When CHW and its partners conclude that public scrutiny might blunt further intentional or accidental damage to a site or other sites in the vicinity, we use social media to broadcast the threat and to help focus the attention of relevant organizations, analysts, journalists and authorities.
Our Tools
Expanding commercial satellite platforms allow us to harness new technologies in service of heritage monitoring.
At the turn of the 21st century, publicly available high-resolution, multispectral satellite imagery provided new opportunities to remotely monitor damage inflicted on archaeological sites from looting and regional conflicts in places like Syria and Iraq. Since then, new commercial and public-domain satellite ventures offer important opportunities to harness evolving technologies of earth observation more directly in service of heritage monitoring. For the purposes of monitoring threatened sites in Nagorno-Karabakh, the ability to control when and where a satellite flies over a site is vital to the forensic assessment of site impacts and deterrence of threats. Planet Lab’s SkySat platform allows CHW to “task” satellites to capture highest resolution (52 cm) multispectral images on demand.
Monitoring Database
Our inventory of cultural heritage sites in Nagorno-Karabakh includes over 2000 entries spread across approximately 12,000 square kilometers.
At any particular moment, we have hundreds of discrete locations under satellite surveillance, including churches and mosques, cemeteries and fields of carved stones, bridges, and other cultural properties that tell the dynamic story of centuries of life in the region. The locations that we monitor will change as conditions on the ground change. Our site inventory is the result of extensive consultations with our partners, who share our concern for heritage preservation in the South Caucasus. Our partners are fundamental to what we do, providing expertise, experience, and eyes on the ground.
CHW’s monitoring effort is specifically focused on heritage monuments. It is not within our mission to document the wider destruction of towns, villages and cities over the 30 years of conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. We focus on historic sites that have been the subject of archaeological, architectural, or art historical research and are included on Soviet or post-Soviet state inventories of cultural properties. But it is important to note that we see the wider, heart-breaking destruction that has impacted the lives of so many Azerbaijani and Armenian families. We deplore the combination of violence and poverty that has created Nagorno-Karabakh’s ravaged landscape. And we surveil these areas with a deep sense of empathy for the lives lost and futures upended. Nevertheless, we draw a distinction between the destruction and abandonment of villages over the course of this long-standing conflict and the systematic attempts to eradicate heritage properties as a means to erase communities from the region’s past and thus rewrite the region’s history. It is our hope that in the years we study this region we will see it bloom with new hope and a lasting peace
There are some kinds of threats to cultural heritage that CHW is not well-equipped to address.
Satellite imagery provides evidence of damage, but it cannot detect acts of desecration or directly combat heritage appropriation. Since the cease-fire, representatives of Azerbaijan’s government have embarked on an extensive campaign to claim Armenian heritage sites as either non-existent or as “Caucasian Albanian”. Both represent fraudulent historical claims unsupported by international research. The vast majority of experts in the region’s art, architecture, and archaeology have all rejected Azerbaijan’s revisionist claims as patently false. Nevertheless, the Caucasian Albanian propaganda has sparked some iconoclastic efforts to erase Armenian imagery and inscriptions from buildings and monuments. We are aware of these threats and track them via social media, but as these subtle but significant forms of erasure are not visible from our satellite imagery, we will have to rely on partners to document these activities.