I had begun reading this story, titled "Iraq Unveils Restoration Plan for Heritage Sites", prepared to be disappointed at another instance in which the focus was being placed on maintenance maintenance and tourist infrastructure rather than on protecting sites against looting. As usual, I thought, the World Heritage Site prize is skewing priorities.
But I was happy to find I was wrong:
But I was happy to find I was wrong:
Another project aimed at protecting archaeological sites involves installing ground sensors around each site to detect and monitor movement and transmit it to specialised offices and security services via satellite, Saleh said.
"This project, which we hope to launch this year, is among the most important to help curtail random excavation by antiquities thieves at archaeological sites that do not have sufficient protection," he said.
"This in turn protects the human and cultural heritage of Iraq against theft and smuggling," he added.
The use of remote monitoring technology to enable antiquities police to detect looting is something that we've been calling for since at least 2007 (see the suggestions collated in Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War). To my knowledge it has not been done elsewhere. There are of course GIS mapping projects and tracking via satellite imagery, but neither of these involves ground sensors and imagery collection and analysis is much too slow to be of great help, whereas one assumes that the ground sensors will stream real-time information. We need to know to be sure, but this Iraqi initiative could be a gamechanger.
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