Arches open community forum and user group meeting, 12 November 2021
MAEASaM was among a group of heritage conservation mapping projects supported by Arcadia (a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin) that gathered on a shared virtual platform with the Getty Conservation Institute and Farallon Geographics in November. Farallon, who manage Arches, demonstrated their current work on internationalisation, which will be coming soon through version 7. This signals an important moment in the recognition of the multiple languages spoken across the world – with the aim to improve on the overall usability, searchability, and reachability of Arches by heritage stakeholders, researchers, and the public alike.
The meeting was chaired by Dr Cameron Petrie from the University of Cambridge and Principal Investigator of the MAHSA project. The meeting was likely to have been one of the largest gatherings of Arcadia-funded projects:
Central Asian Archaeological Landscapes (CAAL)
Endangered Wooden Arhitecture Programme (EWAP)
Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA)
Inventory of Maritime Archaeology in Pakistan (IMAP)
Maritime Asia Heritage Survey (MAHS)
Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM)
Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA)
Maritime Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (MarEA)
Mongolian Archaeology Project (MAPSS)
Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (NHDP)
MAEASaM-MAHSA workshop on the uses of historical
maps, 18 October 2021
The MAEASaM project, in conjunction with Mapping Archaeological Heritage of South Asia
(MAHSA) hosted an open workshop on the challenges, possibilities, and uses of historical
maps for the identification, digitisation, and conservation of archaeological and historical
sites across Africa and South Asia. The session brought together over 135 participants from
24 countries including experts from the fields of archaeology, geoinformatics, heritage
management, and machine learning. Presentations outlined the complexities of identifying
sites from historical based records and how to navigate some of the challenges these
records pose when documenting sites. Exploration of the use of historical maps in machine
learning for site detection was also discussed, bringing to the forefront technological
capabilities that might advance the use of historical maps in the 21st century.