The Maritime Asia Heritage Survey
(MAHS) began in 2020 building upon the success of the Maldives Heritage Survey
(MHS), to create a digital record of sites, buildings, artifacts, manuscripts,
and oral histories in the Maldives, Indonesia, and Thailand. Led by Prof. R.
Michael Feener of Kyoto University and supported by Arcadia, the MAHS Project has
expanded to digitally document historical and archaeological sites across the
broader region of maritime Southern Asia, including new field work in Thailand.
A large part of this project aims to help heritage management authorities to
develop an open online platform to document, store and disseminate information
on the digitized materials to the public.
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The Old Friday Mosque, also known as Hukuru Miskiyy, is a
17th-century coralstone mosque with an elaborate wooden
coffered-ceiling) at Malé, Maldives © Reed, 2024 |
During the third week of May 2024,
MAHS congregated on the island of Gan in Laamu Atoll, in the Maldives to
undertake a week’s workshop with the whole 40 plus project team. This was the
first time all the teams from Kyoto, Thailand, Indonesia and the Maldives had
been brought together. The week’s programme involved a series of fieldwork
exercises to strengthen capacity across all project field and lab teams, to
share experiences and best practices, as well as to upgrade new techniques and
methods for data capture and processing. Kelly Reed, the Programme Manager from
EWAP, joined the group to learn more about field survey techniques within a
similar Arcadia funded programme, as well as strengthening networks in Southern
Asia.
The week started with a series of
presentations from the different teams on survey methodologies, as well as comments
from Zaha Ahmed, Head of Heritage Section, National Center for Cultural
Heritage within the Ministry of Dhivehi Language, Culture and Heritage on how
the work of the MAHS is being used for heritage management at the national and
local levels. It was clear that many of the important sites, monuments and
objects associated with the rich heritage of the different regions are
increasingly under threat from exposure to environmental stresses, such as
coastal erosion, land subsidence and rising sea-levels, as well as rapid and
unplanned construction and in some cases deliberate acts of vandalism. The day
provided a great understanding of the data generated by the surveyors,
architects and archaeologists and how the data is processed and catalogued.
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| Professor Michael Feener kicking of the week © Reed, 2024 |
On the second day fieldwork started.
Fieldwork involved the re-examination of Gan Havittha, the site of an ancient
Buddhist ritual complex and Fonadhoo Old Mosque, an old coralstone
mosque dating back to the 18th century. Both sites had been
previously identified by MHS in 2018 and the aim of this new fieldwork was to
bring newer technologies back to the sites to upgrade the documentation in the
online database. The MAHS field teams use several digital technologies GPS/RTK
(Real-Time Kinetic) mapping, digital photography and photogrammetry, video, CAD
drawings and IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) standard
manuscript digitisation, as well as aerial and terrestrial LiDAR to produce
robust records. Over the next few days, it was interesting to see the fieldwork
in action as well as the near-real-time data processing.
One technique regularly used by EWAP
projects is photogrammetry and this method is also used by MAHS. The method was
used to generate reliable measurements and generate three-dimensional (3D)
models of the artefacts and structures. Both aerial and terrestrial
photogrammetry were performed with 80% overlap on images and using
RealityCapture software to create detailed digital outputs.
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MAHS team members taking images of an
artefact for photogrammetry © Reed, 2024 |
The week was a great success and
underlined the importance of the work that both MAHS and EWAP are doing to
preserve architectural and cultural heritage around the world. A big thank you
to the MAHS team for hosting EWAP!
If you would like to read more about
the work of MAHS you can visit their website here - https://maritimeasiaheritage.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/
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