Our Mission
Caucasus Heritage Watch was founded in 2020 to monitor and document endangered and damaged cultural heritage using high-resolution satellite imagery. We strive to reveal visual evidence regarding past and present cultural erasure using the latest technologies of earth observation. Our purpose is to encourage accountability, inform public policy, support truth and reconciliation, and remove cultural heritage from the front lines of regional conflicts.
Our Goals
- Truth-telling: Investigating and monitoring past and future damage to cultural heritage can contribute to the work of truth and reconciliation. In contexts of war and genocide, cultural aerospace can bear witness to the condition of cultural heritage sites. These facts provide proof to counter state denialism, falsification, and other abuses that place heritage sites at the center of political conflict. Social repair can only happen when societies come to terms with troubled pasts and difficult truths.
- Deterrence: There are few instruments for deterring the destruction of cultural heritage within a state’s sovereign borders. Satellite-based monitoring has the potential to discourage or restrain state actors from intentional erasure both through the act of bearing witness, and by the dissemination of authoritative research to relevant national and international agencies and public.
- Accountability: In contexts of conflict and genocide, abuses to cultural heritage are often clandestine, making it difficult to hold actors accountable. Satellite-based monitoring that reveals the destruction of cultural heritage can provide a forensic resource so that the public can hold responsible parties accountable for harms, including their own leaders.
- Innovation: Caucasus Heritage Watch works to develop new techniques in the use of geospatial technologies for sustained, large-scale monitoring of cultural heritage at risk. As researchers, we seek to innovate new and transferrable methodologies that can amplify our practical impact and disseminate workflows that can empower partners in the region and assist researchers in other parts of the world.