Antiquity 2021 page 1 of 9
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2021.45

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The Maldives Heritage Survey
R. Michael Feener1,2,* , Patrick Daly3, Michael Frachetti4, Ibrahim Mujah5,
Maida Irawani6, Jovial Pally Taran6, Ahmad Zaki6, Fathimath Maasa6,
Mohamed Shamran6, Multia Zahara6, Mariyam Isha Azees6, Krisztina Baranyai6,
Paula Levick6, Hala Bakheit6, Jessica Rahardjo2 & Gabriel Clark4
1Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan
Faculty of History, University of Oxford, UK3
Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore4Spatial Analysis, Interpretation and Exploration Laboratory, Washington University in St Louis, USA
5
National Center for Cultural Heritage, Maldives Ministry of Arts, Culture and Heritage, Malé, Maldives
6Maldives Heritage Survey, Oxford, UK* Author for correspondence: ✉ michael.feener@history.ox.ac.uk
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The Maldives Heritage Survey was established to document cultural heritage vulnerable to human and environmental threats in the Maldives. An open-access online database is being produced to inform academic studies, support heritage-management plans and create a permanent archive of digital heritage resources.

Keywords: Maldives, Indian Ocean, Buddhism, Islam, climate change, heritage, photogrammetry, lidar

The Maldives Heritage Survey is a collaboration between the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, the Earth Observatory of Singapore, SAIELab at Washington University in St Louis, andthe National Center for Cultural Heritage under the Ministry of Arts, Culture and Heritage
in the Maldives. The Maldives is an Indian Ocean archipelago of low-lying coral atolls thatconsists of 1192 islands, fewer than 200 of which are currently inhabited. The islands havebeen an important site on the historic maritime crossroads facilitating the circulation of peoples, goods and ideas across the Indian Ocean world—with signiﬁcant commercial and cultural connections to Africa, Arabia, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and China. These islands
have at various points been the location of Buddhist monastic communities, a Muslim sultanate beginning in the twelfth century (and visited by Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth), and abrief Portuguese occupation in the sixteenth, as well as in turns a Dutch and a British protectorate before the establishment of the modern state in 1968 (Feener 2021).
Beyond its broad outlines, the history of these islands is little known due to the lack ofdocumentary sources available for its study. Since the pioneering work of Bell (1922), theceramic sherd collection by Carswell (1975), and the more systematic excavations done by
Skjølsvold (1991) and Mikkelsen (1991, 2000) following in the wake of Heyerdahl’s(1986) ‘Maldive Expedition’, little archaeological work had been done until a recent waveof new activity in the ﬁeld by Haour et al. (2016, 2017), Jameel (2017), Pradines (2018)
Received: 30 November 2020; Revised: 22 December 2020; Accepted: 12 January 2021
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and Jaufar (2019). An open-access library offering a fuller bibliography of publications isavailable on the Maldives Heritage Survey website. These excavations and architectural
studies have produced a new level of detailed knowledge about several early Islamic sites.
As a complement to these precision-focused investigations, our work provides the ﬁrst evercomprehensive survey of the tangible cultural heritage of the Maldives. This enables us tomap the spatial distributions of Buddhist, Islamic and other historic and archaeologicalsites across the entire country.
Completing this work is urgent as the low-lying islands of the Maldives face existential
threats from climate change and other forms of environmental stress, as well as vulnerabilities
to human acts of vandalism and destruction. These factors have motivated our work to locate,
document and make an inventory of endangered tangible cultural heritage and to create anopen-access and permanently archived record of the Maldivian past.
We conducted two years of full-time ﬁeld survey from April 2018 until 2020. We surveyed 152 islands across six atolls (Figure 1) and documented over 292 sites with 1171 structures, 5761 small objects, in addition to digitising 410 manuscripts in Dhivehi and Arabic(Table 1). Sites were located using a combination of archival research, consultation withlocal communities and systematic ﬁeld-walking. We documented each site with a combination of mapping and measurement, photography, ﬁeld notes and oral histories. We usedphotogrammetry and a Faro Focus lidar station to record high-resolution 3D data for complex
architectural features and select objects. The current condition of each site was evaluated andpossible threats from environmental and other sources identiﬁed. Alongside the primaryﬁeldwork, we also worked with institutions outside the Maldives to digitise relevant materials
from their collections. Records for each site, structure and object, along with archives of digitised manuscripts, 3D visualisations and other resources, are open access on the project website. Full datasets for lidar scans of sites and structures are also made freely available through
OpenHeritage3D. Project data are permanently archived within the Oxford Research Archive of the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library system.
Our work has contributed signiﬁcantly towards generating new knowledge about the history of the Maldives, contextualising the limited work that had been done previously at asmall number of select sites by creating a new map that spatialises historical patterns of settlement and the establishment of Buddhist and Islamic ritual sites across the archipelago. For
purposes of illustration in this brief note we present some of our key ﬁndings by atoll.

LaamuOn the island of Gan a large artiﬁcial mound site had been documented by Bell (1922) in oneof the rare earlier archaeological explorations of the Maldives. While Bell and his team identiﬁed nine structures on this site (Figure 2), our work there documented the ruins of dozens
of additional structures and earthworks, allowing us to map the actual extent and spatialorganisation of this major Buddhist ritual complex for the ﬁrst time (Figure 3).
On the same island a coral stone boulder carved with a kala head on one face (Figure 4)
and Sanskrit inscription of a Buddhist mantra on its reverse (Figure 5) was recovered for theMaldives National Museum.
An interactive 3D model of this piece can be accessed on the project website.
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd.

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The Maldives Heritage Survey© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd.

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Figure 1. Atolls in the Maldives included in the Maldives Heritage Survey (map by the Maldives Heritage Survey, courtesy of Google Earth).

R. Michael Feener et al.
Table 1. Database records created by the Maldives Heritage Survey, 2018–2020.
Name of atoll

Islands

Sites

Structures

Objects

Manuscripts

Laamu
Gnaviyani
Kaafu
Seenu
Haa AlifHaa Dhaalu
Ashmolean Museum
Maldives National Archives
Total

70
1
16
21
36
8––
152

100
35
43
32
59
23–
–
292

374
131
118
378
139
31––
1171

1179
338
993
1735
655
114
747
–
5761–
–
1
2
81
23–
303
410

Figure 2. Site plan by Bell (1922), rotated for north orientation.
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd.

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Figure 3. Site plan of the pre-Islamic mound site on Laamu Gan (LAM-GAN-2) by the Maldives Heritage Survey (2018).

The Maldives Heritage Survey© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd.

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R. Michael Feener et al.

Figure 4. Face of the coral stone head from Laamu Gan (LAM-GAN-1-SO1; photograph by the Maldives HeritageSurvey).

Gnaviyani
On Fuvamulak we documented another large Buddhist sanctuary comprised of stupas andother ruins in the vicinity of a large artiﬁcial mound. We also mapped early mosques andMuslim burial grounds around the Buddhist site, thus revealing a topography of religiouschange on the island.
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The Maldives Heritage Survey

Figure 5. Reverse of the coral stone head from Laamu Gan (LAM-GAN-1-SO1) with Sanskrit inscription(photograph by the Maldives Heritage Survey).

Seenu
On the island of Hulhumeedhoo we surveyed Koagaanu—the largest historic cemetery in theMaldives. It contains 1535 carved coral gravestones, ﬁve mosques and numerous other structures, including the shrine mausoleum of a saint traditionally credited with the Islamisationof the island in the twelfth century.

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Haa Alifu
In the northernmost atoll of the country the ruins of saints’ shrines and recital halls for
Islamic devotional texts read to celebrate the birth of the Prophet were documented. The
ritual activities that deﬁned these sites were once widespread across the Maldives andthe broader Indian Ocean world, but have almost completely disappeared in the country
since the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Kaafu
New ﬁeld-survey work in this atoll was combined with the enhancement of existing
documentation and integration of that data into our open-access online archive. This
has allowed us to build upon Mikkelsen’s (2000) work at the Buddhist site on Kaashidhoo.
In Malé we integrated heritage documentation produced by teams from the Maldives National
Defence Ministry and Water Solutions Ltd for the great Friday Mosque into our database andprovided additional contextual information on this and other sites in the nation’s capital.

Discussion
Our work in the Maldives has furthered knowledge of the spatiality of historical religious
transformations in the Maldives, and has provided the most comprehensive documentation
yet of structures at a number of Buddhist ritual mound complexes. Another major contribution of the project has been the recording of vanishing traces of sites and structures associatedwith earlier forms of Islamic religious practice in the country. Tomb shrines and dedicatedhalls for the ritual recitation of devotional texts were once common across these islands
and much of the broader Indian Ocean world, but have been largely abandoned over thepast half century in the face of new visions of Islamic reform.
Beyond speciﬁcally religious sites, our survey also recorded vernacular architecture andrelated aspects of material culture to provide an invaluable resource documenting thechanging dynamics of daily life and local cultural practices through to the present day.
Over the past three years we have made considerable progress towards our goal, but muchwork remains to be done. Between 2020 and 2025 we will complete our survey of theMaldives and begin to expand operations to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Brunei and Vietnam
under the new rubric of the Maritime Asia Heritage Survey, with continuing support
from the Arcadia Fund. This will allow us to produce a comprehensive archive of the richcultural heritage of interconnectivity across Maritime Asia, which will be made freely
available online and permanently archived in secure digital repositories.
Acknowledgements
This work comprises Earth Observatory of Singapore contribution 346. We are grateful toJost Gippert and Arlo Grifﬁths for deciphering the Sanskrit inscription in Figure 5.
Funding statement
The Maldives Heritage Survey was supported by the Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund ofLisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin (project 3984).
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References
Jaufar, S. 2019. An archaeological study of theMaldive Islands: investigating the Islamic periodsettlements. Unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of East Anglia.
Mikkelsen, E. 1991. An archaeological pottery
sequence from Nilandu, the Maldive Islands (TheKon-Tiki Museum Occasional Papers 2): 185–202. Oslo: The Kon-Tiki Museum.
– 2000. Archaeological excavations of a monastery atKaashidhoo. Malé: National Center for Linguisticand Historical Research.
Pradines, S. 2018. Archaeological investigations on
the coral stone mosques of the Maldives. Available at:https://maxvanberchem.org/en/scientiﬁcactivities/projects/archeology/11-archeologie/
171-archaeological-investigations-on-the-coralstone-mosques-of-the-maldives (accessed 24March 2021).
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Heyerdahl, T. 1986. The Maldive mystery. Chevy
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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd.

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