On 29 September, Working Group 2 of CPP4ALL met in Santiago de Compostela for a one-day workshop built around a deliberately open question: can technology, old or new, do anything meaningful about illegal archaeological excavation? Our hosts were CRETUS at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, and the day was put together by WG2 leader Jaime Almansa-Sánchez.
Ignacio Rodríguez Temiño opened with a keynote on protection and security at Carmona, Spain’s oldest site museum. It was a useful reminder that people have been trying to protect sites for a long time. From there we moved through four sessions. The first covered monitoring and site use, including tourism and underwater heritage. The second covered drones and satellites: UAVs, LiDAR, AI-derived risk mapping and continuous satellite alerts. The third looked at data, from integration to open-source intelligence on looting. The last dealt with ethics, law and economics.
The day closed with a discussion on the first results of the Action’s technology survey and on what comes next.
Many thanks to all of our speakers, to everyone who joined online, and to our hosts in Santiago.