![]() We’ll tell you more about that in just a bit. Finally, he’s an expert in documenting archaeological sites using drones - so he took the lead in confirming the first batch of sites found by our citizen scientists. He also helps us decide what incoming data would be most immediately useful to local archaeological research and protection. ![]() Luis Jaime has deep knowledge of where archaeologists are working in Peru’s various regions, so he has been instrumental in helping GlobalXplorer° figure out which of the crowd-identified sites should be prioritized for investigation. Larry Coben, an archaeologist who founded Sustainable Preservation Initiative (SPI), our in-country partner for ground truthing and community development projects, and our NatGeo point person Matthew Piscitelli - an archaeologist specializing in Peru - connected GlobalXplorer° with archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, vice president of SPI in Peru as well as a National Geographic Explorer, professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and former Peruvian vice minister of culture. GlobalXplorer° partnered with National Geographic to help us make all the connections we needed to join up our crowdsourcing efforts with experts on the ground in Peru. ![]() Luis Jaime Castillo Butters at work with a drone. We knew that Peru’s authorities and archaeological community would be happy to receive and make use of the data GlobalXplorer° would generate. Topping all those considerations off was that archaeologists had not yet mapped Peru’s sites in totality. We knew that GlobalXplorer° would be able to help alleviate the challenge of finding looted sites. Finally, Peru is also a country whose sites have been vulnerable to looting for hundreds of years, an ongoing problem that authorities are constantly working to address. We wanted the archaeologists we partnered with to be safe - someplace with no threat of war or conflict. We also needed to test GlobalXplorer° on a country that has its archaeological sites out in the open - without too much forest coverage, for example - and Peru’s coastal desert landscape fit the bill. Second, we knew that Peru’s government and archaeological experts are open to the use of technology: the Ministry of Culture in Peru has been using drones to map sites for the last several years. First, it is known as a country rich in archaeological heritage - from Machu Picchu to the Nasca lines and beyond - so we knew it would excite the interest of citizen scientists around the world. While we had the whole planet to choose from, we settled on Peru for a variety of important reasons. Image: Jennifer Wolfe Why Peru?įor its first expedition, GlobalXplorer° had a tough choice to make: where to begin our mission. The region within Peru that the GlobalXplorer° crowd examined. The search took in 150,000 square kilometers of the country, from Peru’s Pacific coast to the Sacred Valley. Since the day of launch, over 70,000 citizen scientists from more than 100 countries joined the GlobalXplorer° mission, logged in and began looking at and voting on 14,620,932 individual satellite images of Peru, covering 20% of the country, in a region where we thought the search would be most fruitful. As we recently reported, the GlobalXplorer° platform was built in conjunction with our partners DigitalGlobe, a satellite-image provider whose high-resolution images of Earth GlobalXplorerº users combed through for signs of archaeological sites. It all began on January 30th, 2017, when we launched the new GlobalXplorer° platform and put it in the hands of the crowd. ![]() As it turned out - as with the best experiments - the outcomes were both better than what we could have hoped for and opened up many new questions to be answered and explored. While we were full of hope, we weren’t entirely sure what to expect. GlobalXplorer° proved our theory that the crowd can seriously speed up the important but time-consuming task of mapping the world’s archaeological sites, taking the first step towards creating a tool that would help humanity protect and preserve our collective cultural heritage. Could we demonstrate that our vision was possible? We could, and we did. Here, we’ll fill you in on some of the insights we gleaned from this ambitious and unprecedented experiment. GlobalXplorer° is thrilled to announce the results of our inaugural expedition - the world’s first crowdsourced mapping of archaeological sites in Peru. GlobalXplorer° Completes Its First Expedition: What the Crowd Found in Peru
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