As ISIS campaigns to eradicate non-Islamic cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria and developers throughout the world encroach on sites where antiquities are found, it seems as though the relics of our past have never been at greater risk of being lost to history.

Or are they? Technology like geospatial sensing, satellites, drones, 3-D imaging, and the like can be deployed to restore what might otherwise be destroyed forever.

Join Future Tense in Washington, D.C., at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 28, for a discussion of how present technologies are being used to deliver the past to the future. A reception will follow the conversation. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.

Participants:

Kirk Johnson
Sant director, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Scott Branting
Assistant professor of anthropology, University of Central Florida
Project director, heritage mapping and data integration with the American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives*

Salam Al Kuntar
Assistant professor of anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Associate faculty, Penn Cultural Heritage Center

Sarah R. Graff
Senior faculty fellow, Barrett, the Honors College, and faculty affiliate of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University

*Correction, Jan. 8, 2016: This post originally misidentified Scott Branting as an assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Central Florida. He is an assistant professor of anthropology there. It also misidentified him as the director for geospatial initiatives at the American School for Oriental Research. He no longer holds that position.