New to the Archaeologist’s Tool Kit: The Drone

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As land values rise, Peru’s ancient sites are under threat from development. To respond, Peru is creating a drone air force to map, monitor and safeguard its endangered treasures.

CHEPÉN, Peru — A small remote-controlled helicopter buzzed over ancient hilltop ruins here, snapping hundreds of photographs. Below, stone walls built more than a thousand years ago by the Moche civilization gave way to a grid of adobe walls put up only recently by what officials said were land speculators, reported the New York Times.

“This site is threatened on every side,” said Dr. Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, Peru’s vice minister of cultural heritage as he piloted the drone aircraft.

Archaeologists around the world, who have long relied on the classic tools of their profession, like the trowel and the plumb bob, are now turning to the modern technology of drones to defend and explore endangered sites. And perhaps nowhere is the shift happening as swiftly as in Peru, where Dr. Castillo has created a drone air force to map, monitor and safeguard his country’s ancient treasures.

Unmanned systems conference 2014 – Israel

Drones mark “a before and after in archaeology,” said Dr. Castillo, who is also a prominent archaeologist and one of a dozen experts who will outline the use of drones at a conference in San Francisco next year.

In remote northwestern New Mexico, archaeologists are using drones outfitted with thermal-imaging cameras to track the walls and passages of a 1,000-year-old Chaco Canyon settlement, now buried beneath the dirt.

Peru, with its stunning concentration of archaeological riches, is suddenly fertile ground to try out this new technology. The country is becoming a research hot spot as archaeologists in the Middle East and elsewhere find their work interrupted by unrest.

Earlier on Cerro Chepén, Aldo Watanave, who leads Dr. Castillo’s drone team, had been unable to get a larger drone to work when the apparatus that controls the camera’s movement failed. Dr. Castillo and his staff often must rely on their ingenuity, jury-rigging the drones to hold cameras in place. In this instance, Mr. Watanave tried tying the apparatus in place with string but then the mechanism that made the camera take pictures at regular intervals also went on the fritz. Dr. Castillo ended up using a smaller drone for the job.