For the past year Cindy Waweru and Keith Murangiri, have been based at British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) and have worked with the MAEASaM Project under the supervision of Pamela Ochungo and Angela Kabiru.

Here they share their thoughts on the work they conducted and the importance it has in preserving heritage.

Why Historical Maps Still Matter

W
hen we think of historical maps, many of us imagine delicate sheets stored in museums, archives, or libraries—carefully tucked away and rarely touched: these maps hold incredible value! They show us what towns looked like a century ago, how rivers once flowed, and how modern urban centres were once forests. In Kenya, collections at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK), the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), the Survey of Kenya, and the Kenya National Archives safeguard important cartographic archives. Many of the historical maps we are working with were originally acquired and annotated by archaeologists to facilitate survey and mapping before the advent of GPS technology.

“Paper maps are fragile. Even in safe hands, they fade, tear, and deteriorate over time. So how do we protect their information while making them easier to use? The answer lies in digitisation.”

The MAEASaM project has facilitated the scanning of over 900 such maps stored at the NMK and BIEA, in order to create digital copies of these fragile and immensely rich documents. Our current georeferencing process seeks to spatially reconcile these legacy maps with modern coordinate systems, enabling their integration into contemporary digital heritage workflows.

What Is Georeferencing?

Georeferencing is the process of aligning a scanned historical map with a digital coordinate system so it can be used alongside today’s spatial data in a GIS (Geographical Information System) environment. Kenyan historic topographic maps at the scale of 1:50,000 were originally produced using, for the most part, the Arc 1960 datum (based on the Clarke 1880 (RGS) ellipsoid). Because most contemporary datasets use the WGS84 datum, we first assign the correct historical reference system and then reproject the maps from Arc 1960 to WGS84 in QGIS.

This ensures that the maps align accurately with modern satellite imagery and GPS-based data. Where needed, identifiable features such as road junctions, river bends, or trig points help confirm the spatial fit.

Once transformed into WGS84, these historical maps can be layered with current datasets, allowing us to compare past and present landscapes and revisit archaeological sites recorded decades ago with far greater positional confidence.

What We Learned from the Landscape

Using this exercise we can find site in the landscape which were mapped a long tima ago. We are then able to reveal just how much landscapes changed and explore these differences. Comparing old maps with today’s satellite images showed how roads shifted, villages disappeared, and new developments replaced cultural spaces.

As we progressed, our confidence with digital mapping tools grew. We became more skilled at selecting reliable control points, which are clearly identifiable locations such as road intersections or buildings that help anchor a scanned map to its correct real-world position. We also learned how to correct distortions, which means adjusting maps that may appear stretched, tilted, or warped so that the features align accurately with their true geographic locations. Along the way, we gained valuable skills such as vectorisation (tracing features like roads or rivers to convert them into digital map layers), converting GPS points into maps, recording coordinates, and designing clear and informative maps. Together, these skills greatly strengthened our overall research and mapping abilities.

“These observations help support local oral histories, providing visual evidence of how environments transform over time.”

Why Georeferencing Is Essential for Heritage Protection

Georeferencing is not just a technical exercise—it plays an important role in monitoring and protecting heritage sites. With clear visual data, researchers and heritage organisations can track how sites are threatened by urbanisation, infrastructure projects, climate change, and even looting.
When communities use georeferenced maps to compare past and present environments, they gain insights into environmental shifts and potential risks. This allows for better planning, disaster prediction, and conservation strategies. Accurate digital maps also support archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists in conducting modern, data-driven research.

Dramatic landscape transformation revealed through map comparison: from rural settlements to urban expansion. This is demonstrated at the double ring cairn Kokumartakore Hill, Kalacha under excavation in 1980 (left, photograph taken by Dan Stiles and featured in Azania 1981) and the same area being mapped by the BIEA MAEASaM team in 2022 (right, photograph taken by John Kanyingi).
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A Growing Passion for Mapping and Heritage

This project strengthened our passion for GIS and archaeology. It showed us how technology can breathe life into history and how digital tools can safeguard Kenya’s memory and cultural legacy. The skills we gained through the MAEASaM project boosted our confidence and enabled us to contribute meaningfully to heritage preservation.

“Protecting old maps is about more than preserving documents—it is about honouring our collective memory.”

Knowing that our work helps secure the past for future generations fills us with pride, hope, and the drive to continue supporting historical preservation initiatives.

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Pamela Ochungo and Kennedy Gitu for their guidance and supervision during the entire MAEASaM internship, John Kanyingi for the GIS classes we have had to improve on our georeferencing, use of QGIS and Google Earth Pro, Angela Kabiru for helping us in site identification and documentation and finally Steven Mfupe and Mary Macharia for their contribution during their time as graduate attaches at the BIEA.