{"id":1988,"date":"2026-03-31T14:21:48","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T14:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/?p=1988"},"modified":"2026-03-31T14:24:59","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T14:24:59","slug":"advances-in-heritage-forensics-revisiting-the-destruction-of-st-john-the-baptist-church-in-shusha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/?p=1988","title":{"rendered":"Advances in Heritage Forensics: Revisiting the Destruction of St. John the Baptist Church in Shusha"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In April 2024, CHW reported the destruction of <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/CaucasusHW\/status\/1781024819296833764?s=20\">St. John the Baptist Church<\/a>, a 19th century Armenian religious center and cultural landmark that had stood in the historic city of Shusha for 177 years. Using a new method of satellite analysis, CHW has been able to narrow the timing of the destruction from several months to under two weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To achieve a more precise date for the church\u2019s destruction, CHW, in collaboration with our partners at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.planet.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Planet<\/a>, developed a dual satellite monitoring approach. This method, which CHW first tested in our analysis of the <a href=\"https:\/\/storymaps.arcgis.com\/stories\/b76cce62be074519af3adfb870bc2b31\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u201cRed Cross\u201d Church of Bina\/Tumi<\/a>, entails harnessing the complementary monitoring capabilities of two tiers of satellite imagery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>CHW Created a <a href=\"https:\/\/storymaps.arcgis.com\/stories\/b497aea16f8d4c6b8bbe19927a992bef\">new Story Map<\/a> to explain exactly how this works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In April 2024, CHW reported the destruction of St. John the Baptist Church, a 19th century Armenian religious center and cultural landmark that had stood in the historic city of Shusha for 177 years. Using a new method of satellite analysis, CHW has been able to narrow the timing of the destruction from several months [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1991,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"saved_in_kubio":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-heritage-monitoring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1990,"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1988\/revisions\/1990"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caucasusheritage.cornell.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}