Mapping Africa's Archaeological Sites and Monuments Five Years on: Reflections on Digitisation, Sustainability and Sharing

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Professor Paul Lane and Dr. Stefania Merlo, University of Cambridge
• Tuesday 21 October 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Hybrid/McDonald Seminar Room .

If you have a question about this talk, please contact William Wright.

Co-Hosted with the African Archaeology Group

Archaeological sites and monuments around the world are increasingly threatened by human activities and the impacts of climate change. These pressures are compounded in sub-Saharan Africa for example, where existing sites and monuments registers tend to be incompletely digitised, where many sites are undocumented and under-studied, and where local heritage agencies are often short-staffed and under-resourced. Such pressures combine to make the implementation of planning controls, impact assessments, mitigation measures and long-term monitoring of national heritage especially challenging. Enabled by Arcadia’s grant funding for a further five years (2024-29), the MAEA SaM project is working alongside partners and authorities in eleven countries of Africa to help meet these challenges. The mission is to identify and digitally document endangered sites and monuments, using a combination of remote sensing, records-based research and selective archaeological surveys conducted on the ground to verify data collected. This work is culminating in the creation of a repository of digital assets accessible to heritage professionals, researchers and students across the continent; in short, a sustainable system for assessing, researching, monitoring and managing archaeological heritage, more rapidly and more easily. This seminar summarises the work undertaken thus far and explores some of the issues that have emerged regarding the digitisation of legacy records, the use of remote sensing for mapping archaeological sites, the archiving and sharing of data and the challenges associated with longer term sustainability of the digital records after funding dries up.

This talk is part of the Department of Archaeology - Heritage Research Group series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Department of Archaeology - Heritage Research Group
• Hybrid/McDonald Seminar Room

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.