Endangered Archaeology in the Archives: utilizing historical aerial photography to assess heritage
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-02-11

The Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project aims to locate, document and monitor archaeological sites and any damage to those sites in an online platform for the Middle East and North Africa region utilising remote sensing and networks of professionals. The threat to archaeological sites due to political and social upheaval in the MENA region has drawn much attention and is being effectively monitored remotely by a number of projects, but the more gradual threats to sites from development and agriculture over the last century are less well documented. Historical aerial imagery collections from the first half of the 20th century are a fantastic resource that has captured landscapes and sites before modern development, population increase and conflict drastically changed the region and accelerated heritage loss. The collections however are scattered between institutions and many are poorly documented. The paper will present how EAMENA with the Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East (APAAME) has begun working with these collections to not only utilise a fantastic resource for the documentation of heritage, but to digitise and facilitate knowledge sharing of what these collections hold.

Author - Banks, Rebecca, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom (Presenting author)