Every year, hundreds of racers from around the world gather in northern Chile with their all-terrain motorcycles, jeeps, quads and buggies. They race in circuits for hundreds of miles around the Atacama Desert, carving tire tracks into one of the driest places on Earth.
What many of those racers potentially ignore is that the Atacama was once a canvas for ancient Indigenous peoples of South America. Starting 3,000 years ago, those Indigenous people carved vast figures of animals, humans and objects on the desert’s slopes. Known as geoglyphs, the specimens at Alto Barranco in the Tarapacá region stand out for their remarkable preservation.
But it is in that very location that both authorized and illegal off-road racing has occurred.
Imagery made with drones and released this month by Gonzálo Pimentel, an archaeologist and president of the Fundación Desierto de Atacama, a Chilean nongovernmental organization, highlighted the accumulated damage to what he calls the “the desert’s history book.” Vehicles — also including trucks from mining operations — run roughshod over the geoglyphs in Alto Barranco and other zones of the desert, scarring them with hundreds of tracks.
“When we saw the drone footage, we couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Pimentel said, noting that several key figures were now barely recognizable. The worst part, he added, is that “the damage is irreversible.”
Faced with increasing destruction of Alto Barranco’s art from off-road drivers and other encroachments, and potential damage to other desert regions of archaeological importance, activists say governments at all levels of the country are not doing enough to preserve them.
“It’s a tragedy,” said Luis Pérez Reyes, director of the Regional Museum of Iquique, who credits a love of the geoglyphs as a child with inspiring him to become an archaeologist.
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