Archaeological heritage ‘on-the-rise’: detecting emerging tourist attractions in Peru using machine learning and geotagged photographs

ABSTRACT

Unlike large cities and urban heritage attractions, archaeological heritage sites in peripheral locations cannot readily absorb the impact of over-tourism. Peru’s rapid growth as a tourist destination since the late 1990s has been bolstered by the popularity of its archaeological heritage sites and past civilizations, particularly in the Cuzco region. As mass tourism and issues of overcrowding have confronted visitors and heritage managers in the Cuzco region, tourists have sought alternative archaeological attractions beyond Cuzco’s ticketed sites – many of which are open-access and unmonitored. By integrating large-scale internet photo datasets from Flickr and the power of computer vision and machine learning algorithms, this study identifies ‘on-the-rise’ (i.e. emerging) archaeological heritage attractions accessible from five Peruvian cities. The major contributions of this paper are (1) to provide a novel method capable of being scaled globally to identify emerging archaeological tourist attractions that are unmonitored by ticket sales, (2) to identify ‘on-the-rise’ archaeological attractions in Peru, and (3) to mitigate future risk (e.g. over-tourism, pollution, destruction and damage) at identified sites as tourist itineraries continue to expand. The identification of emerging archaeological heritage attractions is significant for targeted and sustainable heritage planning, archaeological conservation, future destination marketing and tourism development.

KEYWORDS:

• Archaeology
• heritage tourism
• machine learning
• geotagged photos
• tourist hotspots
• spatial analysis

Acknowledgements

Thank you to R. Alan Covey and Wei-Lin Hsiao for providing feedback on earlier versions of this article. Thank you to the editors and reviewers for their suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Map inlays of Peru are attributed to the following creators under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license via Wikimedia Commons: ‘Peru on the Globe – Peru Centered’, Addicted04 (Figures 1 and 4); ‘Perú_Cusco’, ‘Perú_Ica’, ‘Perú_LaLibertad’, Guillermo Romero (Figures 5, 6 and 7).

2 Satellite imagery of Peru was obtained through Planet’s Education and Research Program (Planet Team, 2017).

3 A virtual machine was built using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to conduct this study. A new user credit ($300 USD) was provided by GCP. The project did not exceed the free credit amount, making it a low-cost solution for identifying emerging heritage attractions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole D. Payntar

Nicole D. Payntar is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on machine learning and computer vision techniques for heritage tourism and landscape archaeology. She has previously served on the Antiquities Coalition’s Culture Under Threat Task Force and as the former Assistant Director of Saving Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE).