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86 Yves Ubelmann, President and co-founder of ICONEM, which specialises in the 3-D digitisation of endangered cultural heritage sites, joined Kristin Parker, consulting partner with the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), and Dr Emma Cunliffe, Research Associate in the Cultural Property Protection and Peace team at Newcastle University, in a conversation moderated by Oliver van Damme, Programme Specialist for Planning and Co- ordination at UNOSAT - a technology programme that delivers satellite imagery analysis. An archaeologist by training, Dr Cunliffe’s work now focuses on how technology, and specifically satellite imaging, can improve site monitoring and protection policies through remote assessment of site disturbance and damage. “What is really exciting is that there are countries who haven’t had highly technological heritage management systems that now have access to them and that’s a hugely positive step forwards,” she said. “Whole new places are also opening up and, archaeologically, people are scanning Google Earth and finding sites that we didn’t even know about and that’s hugely exciting, but there’s also a huge amount of tracking of damage going on in these areas.” Such technologies also revealed a more fundamental problem, Ms Cunliffe said, which was the slow attrition of sites from more mundane threats such as farming and urban sprawl in cities. The trajectory charted by Mr Ubelmann’s company, ICONEM, spans the full range of heritage protection and conservation, from the digital mapping of remote and previously uninvestigated sites to emergency mapping and archaeological advocacy. Established by him in 2013, ICONEM’s team travels the globe, combining the large-scale scanning capacity of drones and the photorealistic quality of 3-D to create digital replicas of sites in places as diverse as Angkor, Cambodia, Aleppo in Syria and the island of Delos in Greece. The company has also mounted public exhibitions of the images.