The Centre for Global Heritage and Development together with the Universidad Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) and the Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia e Historia (ICAHN, Colombia) have been successful in applying for funding from ARCADIA's Preserving Endangered Culture programme. The Mapping Pre-Columbian Heritage in South America project (MAPHSA) aims at producing the first leading integrated database for the pre-Columbian archaeological heritage of South America that will be Open Access and serve as the primary resource for heritage protection and research repository for the continent. The Colombia research component is led by Dr. Sebastian Fajardo Bernal and started in January 2023, hosted by LIACS.
Remote sensing has been successfully applied to identify pre-Columbian earthworks in the forested and savanna regions of South America, changing our perception of the scale of landscape modification in regions that were previously thought to be pristine (de Souza et al., 2018; Schaan et al., 2012). Furthermore, the remote identification of sites under the forest canopy started to become a reality also through the application of LiDAR technology. However, the full impact of past human occupation in many forested and savanna regions of South America, and consequently the heritage connected to them, is very much underestimated.