Professor Paul Lane, MAEASaM Principal Investigator, introduces the project and discusses the global SIGNIFICANCE OF AFRICAN ARCHAEOLOGY.
Below: Lamu, Kenya
Africa, covering c. 30 million square kilometres, has the longest archaeological record of any of the continents. It was where our hominid ancestors evolved and our species originated, leaving material traces of the human story spanning over three million years. Ensuing millennia witnessed countless inventions, innovations and adaptations to the continent’s diverse and changing physical and cultural environments, generating an exceptionally rich, complex, and fascinating body of evidence of human ingenuity and resilience. The global significance of the continent’s archaeology, and the potential for researchers to combine multiple lines of supplementary evidence to enhance their interpretations of these material traces, is increasingly recognised, and archaeological research by African scholars and their international partners is flourishing.
The insights this research has generated on Africa’s deep past and its comparative value for understanding the origins of our species and symbolic behaviour, the evolution of hunting-gathering-fishing societies, the origins and spread of livestock herding and farming, metallurgy, urbanism, complex socio-political systems, transoceanic trade, and many other topics should be celebrated and more widely popularised. The rapid growth in the use of social media and access to the internet in the last few decades offers an excellent opportunity to do this, especially if this information can be made publicly accessible via an open access platform. As public understanding of the continent’s rich heritage grows so will the levels of care and protection it is given.
Enhancing public and Professional Knowledge
The need to raise awareness is becoming more urgent as the continent’s archaeological heritage is currently facing escalating threats from multiple factors. These include rapid unmonitored urban expansion, large-scale agricultural intensification, oil, gas and mineral extraction, and other major infrastructure projects. Growing impacts of rapid climate change, inter-community violence and international terrorism, and in some cases, deliberate destruction of sites for ideological purposes pose additional threats. Concurrent with this, before the global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a great many African economies were experiencing significant economic growth fuelled in part by foreign investment leading to large-scale landscape change often without sufficient archaeological assessment.
All of these factors make it of paramount importance to enhance both public and professional knowledge of the continent’s archaeology and access to reliable, up-to-date information about its condition and threats.
Below: Barkal, Sudan.
Compiling and collating information on Africa’s archaeological heritage
With generous funding from the Arcadia Foundation for an initial three-year pilot project, and as a response to these diverse challenges, the Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeo
logical Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM) project aims to identify and document endangered archaeological heritage sites across Africa. Coordinated by a team at the University of Cambridge, and assisted by project partners in Africa, Sweden and the UK – at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop (Dakar), University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the British Institute in Eastern Africa (Nairobi), the University of York, University of Exeter and Institute of Archaeology, UCL, and Uppsala University – the project is using a combination of remote sensing, records-based research, and selective archaeological surveys to compile and collate information on the continent’s diverse archaeological heritage.
Launched in September 2020, the project is currently working in eight African countries (Mali, Senegal, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Botswana) in collaboration with national authorities and other research groups in these countries. The primary output will be a geo-referenced database of the continent’s archaeological sites and monuments developed in an Open Access format using the Arches Project platform, tailored for different interest groups and stakeholders. Past, present, and potential future threats to these sites will be identified and assessed, and approaches to enhancing long term site protection measures and new management policies will be developed with the project’s Africa-based partners and collaborators.
The project aims to ensure long-term sustainability of the mapping and monitoring components through targeted training of in-country collaborators and other heritage stakeholders. Working with national authorities, local archaeologists and heritage managers, sustainable Sites and Monuments registers will be established, providing a resource for researchers and heritage professionals alike.
Professor P.J. Lane, MAEASaM Project Principal Investigator