Documenting the endangered archaeology and cultural heritage of the Indus River Basin

Professor Cameron Petrie, who is overseeing the Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA) project, explained why bringing all the relevant data together is so critical.

MAHSA’s work focuses on the Indus River Basin, which is a geographical area stretching across one million square kilometres of Pakistan and north-west India that has seen the rise and fall of many ancient and more recent states and empires.

“This initiative is important academically because researchers want to know a fuller picture about the cultural history of particular places, and they want to understand how things have changed over time,” said Professor Petrie. 

“At one level, MAHSA will provide a lot of core data that can be used by academics to understand what happened in the past, but that is only a part of the picture. 

“At another level, both India and Pakistan have departments of archaeology and cultural heritage, and it is their job to monitor cultural heritage and, if necessary, protect it. 

“So they need to be aware of where archaeological heritage sites are and be in a position to respond when threats arise. At the minute, we’re conscious that both academics and heritage practitioners only actually have a partial understanding of exactly what is out there. So, in fact, we are all missing things. That has an impact on academic research and also the documentation and preservation of cultural heritage. 

“Beyond that, is the significance to the public. Both India and Pakistan have very rich cultural heritage and the populations of both of those countries are very actively engaged in their own heritage, and there is a great deal of groundswell interest in terms of what happened during particular periods of history.”

Professor Lane adds: “The digitisation is being done for two reasons. First, we’re making security copies of those records so that information is not lost because they are very fragile, increasingly.

“The second element of entering that information into the database is to allow the national authorities to identify the range of archaeological sites that have been recorded for the country, their diversity, identifying gaps in spatial coverage of the country, identifying gaps in terms of the temporal range."

An ongoing dialogue with history — and the future 

Both projects have already made some eye-catching and breathtaking discoveries.

Professor Petrie uses the example of Mohenjo-daro, a famous archaeological site in Pakistan established around the 26th century BCE. It was the largest settlement of the ancient Indus Civilisation and was one of the world's earliest major cities. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first site in South Asia to be so designated.

It was first reported by an archaeologist in 1911, who “didn’t think it was particularly interesting, as he thought it was a historical site,” explains Professor Petrie.

“Then, a whole string of eminent archaeologists worked there and demonstrated that it was a really significant site. 

“We went back to some of the original reports and were able to establish that it was first documented a decade before by a Survey of India field team, who were almost certainly gaining information from local people.  

“In addition to Mohenjo-daro, there are a whole string of other sites which we have looked at and all of them were being put on maps if not decades before the archaeologists got there. 

“There is another very famous site called Dholavira (ruins of an ancient Indus Civilization city in India) which was re-discovered in the 1960s but in fact it had been recorded in the 19th century by Survey of India field teams.

“Both of those sites are very famous. I had assumed that we weren’t going to learn very much about such sites, but the discovery that both of them were surveyed decades earlier was quite a surprise. To be honest, it was also the moment that proved to me that what we were doing was going to work. 

“The wow moment was going from realising that it was something that might work to actually seeing it work at a massive scale. We could see things that were staring us in the face — the archaeological mounds are hidden in plain sight.”

There have been similar impactful discoveries for Professor Lane with the MAEASaM project, one of which was in Marsabit County in Northern Kenya around the Chalbi Desert where a dense concentration of stone cairns of different types was identified. 

“We know from the limited number of examples that have been excavated they are used for burial over a span of about 4,000 years, by different groups,” he said.  

“We are showing there must be upwards of 6,000 in these just relatively localised areas in a very arid part of Kenya.    

“People have known for some time that there were stone cairns present in this area, this was not unknown, but simply the density and the number, nobody had sought to just count them which is what we’ve now done very rapidly working with our collaborators.”