Mapping Africa's

Editorial

Welcome to the fifth issue of the MAEASaM newsletter

 

Monitoring the extent of agricultural expansion along the Nile in the fifth cataract region of Sudan from 1968 to 2022. Remote sensing can be used to monitor this expansion of agriculture and its effect on archaeological sites such as burial tumuli (displayed as blue dots), as shown in this CORONA satellite image from 1968 (which shows cultivated fields in darker grey) compared to a false colour infrared Landsat image from 2022 (which shows cultivated fields in red). Background imagery sourced from: Left large and Left inset – the 1960-1972 U.S. Government CORONA satellites, courtesy of the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, University of Arkansas/U.S. Geological Survey; Right large – Landsat 8 (Bands 5, 4, and 3), courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey (acquired via EarthExplorer); Right inset – Bing Maps imagery, courtesy of TomTom, Bing, and Maxar. For further details, and for other examples of threats monitoring for heritage sites, please visit the case studies at Arcadia Fund. Map created by Ed Burnett, University of Cambridge.

 

For readers who find their way to this fifth issue of the MAEASaM project newsletter, welcome. The start of a new year is a good time to look ahead to upcoming schedules, new developments and planned activities. It’s also a time to reflect on the past year, of milestones reached, collaborations formed and partnerships made.

It has been a busy couple of months for the MAEASaM project, with the development of the Beta version of the Arches Database and the expansion of the project’s Site Resource Model. The latter caters for the diversity of heritage data derived from archaeological legacy records and has six complementary resource models to support this (Remote Sensing, Chronology, Administration, Grid, Actor, and Information). The project continues to grow the Arches database multilingual thesauri, covering a range of concepts frequently used in African archaeology and related fields. It is an exercise that has prompted our introspection on past and current ontologies shaping our discipline, and the important work needed to build more inclusive terminologies.

Last year, the second year of our project, over 500,000 square kilometres were visually inspected using different remote sensing techniques such as Google Earth Pro, satellite image processing and predictive modelling – and new perspectives are being gained about past and present landscapes. The theme of landscape is explored in this issue. Within the context of Ancient Mali, Kevin MacDonald and Éloïse Noc of UCL are applying remote sensing techniques to build a picture of past settlement systems in the Middle Niger and adjoining regions. This is followed by a report of the recent mission carried out by UCAD-IFAN’s Nicolas Sagna and colleagues to locate and record archaeological shell mounds that form part of Senegal’s coastal heritage landscape. The mission is part of ongoing ground-truthing work by the Senegalese team and is based on the visual inspection of satellite imagery. The creation of a mobile site recording form using the KoboCollect app has been an important development in the MAEASaM project and helps to facilitate ground verification. A contribution by WITS, Origins Centre’s Serge Kiala delves a little deeper into this innovative tool, which is now being deployed by local teams on the ground.

All these milestones are enabled by collaboration, particularly with the national museums and heritage custodians whose advice and expertise inform the project. The importance of collaboration is reflected in a conversation between Akinbowale Akintayo, University of York, and Zanzibar’s Director of Museums and Antiquities, Mariam Mansab, who gives her perspective on Zanzibar’s heritage management within the wider context of the promotion and conservation of Africa’s heritage sites.

Visit MAEASaM’s case study at Arcadia Fund.