The results are in and I am honored to have been a participant along with being a recipient of this distinguished certification. Thanks again for hosting this amazing competition Warredoc & UNESCO, it has been a pleasure to collaborate with you.

After just having competed with 31 other participants from around the world that consisted of professionals & students trained in GIS technology, data gathering and the like, here along comes me…never have taken a class, nor lecture, however, is self taught, ambitious, determined and somewhat of a dreamer – placed 6th in the ‘UNESCO Heritage Site Digital Mapping Competition 2016 Best Projects‘, under the directive of Warredoc in collaboration with UNESCO. Furthermore, this collective body of research was presented on Tuesday, October 25th in Perugia, Italy within the “Presentation of the United Nations World Water Development Report 2016”.
Additionally, I am truly delighted to be one of four participants that will obtain a ‘Digital Mapping Professional Certificate’ from the Università per Stranieri di Perugia & UNESCO.

My project delves into a civilization of an ingenious & expansive group of hunter gatherers that created (what is known as) an immense and significantly complex site of land formations in the Western Hemisphere dating back thousands of years in the ‘Americas’, built between 1700 and 1100 BC; which is also during the Archaic period by a group of Indigenous people that have been determined to be a skilled & extensive community of hunter gatherers, making up over 1,500 people. They traveled to vast parts of the Eastern US in order to collect projectile points, microliths (also known as spears), soapstone, copper and galena.
Furthermore, this illustrates the fieldwork that I have recently completed due to a 3,500+ mile road trip I took back home this past summer allowing me to conduct this research.
Please take time to visit the site for yourself, so that you can take in the wonderment of this monumental land formation located in the southern state of Louisiana.
Click here for the link to my presentation on the ArcGIS platform and open this to review my previous blog post, which highlights how this magical journey began.
Lastly, it was an honor to have been selected to participate and to be one of the top seven chosen by the jury panel (consisting of of seven judges) of this wondrously memorable & life altering competition.

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