South America's Rock Art Heritage at Risk as World Heritage Committee Meets in Busan

The World Heritage Committee meets in Busan, South Korea, in July to decide new inscriptions, spotlighting the lack of legal protections for South American rock art. The Northern Lowlands have only one World Heritage inscription despite abundant rock art. The Negro-Orinoco-Lake Valencia corridor, a 1,706-mile river connection spanning Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, contains key rock art landscapes such as Tacarigua, Caicara del Orinoco, Atures-Tuparro, Guainía-Casiquiare, and the Negro-Solimões Confluence. This corridor faces threats from erosion, fires, vandalism, climate change, mining, and uncontrolled tourism. During the 2023 drought on the Rio Negro, carvings re-emerged near Manaus, highlighting exposure risks. The author argues that treating the corridor as a transnational cultural route could foster shared conservation, but a joint World Heritage nomination is not yet a live bid. The Busan meeting forces consideration of whether the corridor can be recognized as an interconnected biocultural landscape, requiring a break from 19th-century heritage approaches that favor European monumentality.