Opinion
Given the region’s abundant petroglyphs, why are there so few legal protections and only one World Heritage inscription?
In July, the World Heritage Committee will meet in Busan, South Korea, to decide which sites will be added to the World Heritage List – and what will be needed to protect them. As new inscriptions are considered, South America’s northern lowlands face a blunt question: Given the region’s abundant rock art, why are there so few legal protections—and only one World Heritage-listed inscription?
The answer is not ignorance. South American states still employ a 19th-century script of nation building, shaped by colonial racial hierarchies. The authorized heritage discourse, a term coined by Laurajane Smith, continues to be used to consolidate a single national history and a presumed civilized identity, privileging European legacies and relegating indigenous and black cultures to the margins. Heritage is treated as state property and only validated if it is readable by expert records; local meanings and living social functions are sidelined, and borders become fictional dividing lines that fragment many older connections.
Take, for example, the Negro-Orinoco-Lake Valencia corridor, a continuous river connection of 2,745 kilometers where ecology and culture have been intertwined for thousands of years. It includes the world’s largest river catchment and blackwater river; vast savannas and tropical forests; ancient mountains with flat peaks known as tepuis; and, to the north, Lake Valencia. Important rock art landscapes can also be found along this corridor: Tacarigua and Caicara del Orinoco (Venezuela); Atures-Tuparro and Guainía-Casiquiare (border between Colombia and Venezuela); and the Negro-Solimões confluence (Brazil), among others.
These are not isolated landscapes. Archaeological, linguistic and ethnohistorical evidence points to a long history of mobility and exchange. Finished goods and raw materials moved through the corridor, but so did languages, styles and memories. Within that system, petroglyphs and petroglyphs worked as a technology of emplacement: markings at rapids and confluences where landscape, travel, and oral narratives met.
Today, this legacy is facing a perfect storm: erosion, changing water levels, fires, seasonal exposure, vandalism, climate-induced extremes, mining pressure, uncontrolled tourism and interventions that ‘open up’ sites without the capacity to manage them. During the 2023 drought on the Rio Negro, the carvings resurfaced near Manaus as the waters receded – an event that drew attention to the heritage but also showed how quickly exposure becomes a risk.
Considering the Negro-Orinoco-Lake Valencia corridor as a transnational cultural route could challenge the three states involved. It would require Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela to treat this heritage not as three national assets, but as a shared history, and translate rhetorical governance into real tools: compatible inventories, shared risk maps, conservation standards, public use protocols, and a framework of ethics and polycentric governance in which communities are decision makers.
But turning that idea into a World Heritage nomination is a tall order – and that won’t happen in Busan this July. At this time, the corridor is a research-based proposal, not a live bid. To become one, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela should take this up and build a joint dossier that treats nature and culture as one story and delivers measurable benefits with, by and for the communities living in these places. Busan is not where the nominations are submitted, but the meeting is a global spotlight on what “protection” looks like in practice. Archaeologist Lynn Meskell has described the World Heritage system as an impasse, where politics and bureaucracy can make protection an obstacle – especially for countries with lower institutional capacity – and where prejudices that favor European monumentality and technocratic language persist.
Busan is important because it forces us to think about whether the Negro-Orinoco-Lake Valencia corridor can be treated as an interconnected biocultural landscape. Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela could translate this shared vision into a joint nomination for the World Heritage List in the Transnational Cultural Route category. This would require a break, both internally and externally, with the 19th century approach to heritage that favored European monumentality and technocratic language.
