Here's Looking at You: the Ethics and Politics of UAV-based vs. Satellite-based Archaeological Survey in the Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The collection of geographically extensive archaeological datasets from satellite imagery and sensors mounted on piloted aircraft and UAVs is transforming how archaeologists study the past, enabling us to map sites in difficult terrain, at new levels of detail, and explore social and political transformations at the scale of large regions. Yet the forms of vision engendered by satellite archaeology all too often seek to perform what Donna Haraway calls the "god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere," masking the conditions of possibility by which digital data are collected, misrepresenting their completeness, and offering little consideration of their practical impact on non-archaeologists. Drawing on feminist critiques of geographic visualization, I explore the ethics and politics of distinct forms of aerial vision, contrasting UAV-based and satellite-based survey through a case study from Peru's Chachapoyas region, where our work has incorporated both satellite imagery and LiDAR, hyperspectral imagery, RGB photographs and thermal imagery collected using UAV-mounted sensors.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23784