WELCOME
Welcome to the second issue of the MAEASaM newsletter. As 2021 winds down, we can reflect on a year when significant objectives have been met in the face of major challenges caused largely by the global Covid pandemic.
Despite the obstacles, the resiliency, adaptability, and inventiveness of members, collaborators and partners have been clear to see. So far, over 11,000 site records have been digitised in the tailor-made Arches database. This growing repository includes sites from Mali, Senegal, Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Botswana, located through legacy records and remote sensing surveys. Over 229,800 square kilometres have been systematically investigated for potential heritage sites. The team has worked hard to deliver other key milestones. We launched our social media channels and are using these to communicate about the project, celebrate Africa’s archaeological sites and monuments and raise awareness of the increasing threats that so many of them face today. We held three joint open access workshops with MAEASaM’s sister project, Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA) (MAHSA), to exchange knowledge and facilitate workable solutions, the latest being on the use of historical maps in archaeological research.
While the pandemic has made it more difficult to move forward seamlessly in some areas, the team continues to strengthen collaboration, focused on the shared objective of building a meaningful and unified digital record of in-country African archaeological heritage with African-based heritage institutions. As Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web has observed, “The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.” It is a reminder of how the digital technologies we are deploying in the project can connect, enhance, and develop human capital: capacity and shared knowledge. There is still much to be done globally however – not least to correct the digital imbalance that is a serious obstacle in lower-resource environments. The MAEASaM project is firmly focused on these social and technical dimensions and shares the ambition with its key heritage stakeholders to enable the long-term sustainability of digital archaeological repositories and tools in Africa.
Collaborations and collective efforts are celebrated in this issue of the newsletter. To illuminate the theme, we are pleased to present two contributions by project collaborators and partners: Dr Emmanuel Ndiema, Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) and Professor Ibrahima Thiaw, who directs the Archaeological Laboratory at IFAN, University of Cheikh Anta Diop (IFAN-UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal. Both articles offer unique insights into the nature of their respective national archaeological archives, and the role of digital and spatial technologies in the documentation and conservation of archaeological sites and monuments.
Paul Lane
Principal Investigator, MAEASaM
Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer
Professor of the Deep History & Archaeology of Africa,
Archaeology Department,
University of Cambridge
Stefania Merlo
Project Manager, MAEASaM
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
University of Cambridge
Faye Lander
Regional Project Manager, MAEASaM
Origins Centre,
University of the Witwatersrand