The Maritime Asia Heritage Survey (MAHS) digitally documents endangered historical and archaeological heritage across multiple maritime Southern Asian countries, with field teams currently working in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Maldives. Working year-round out of mobile field offices in each country and supported by the Digital Heritage Documentation Lab in Kyoto, the MAHS Field Teams explore and document sites in remote regions that combine conventional field survey approaches of surveying, photography, architecture, and archaeological surface survey with cutting-edge technology. Data captured in the field is uploaded for processing by the Kyoto Lab team, which works with material from database entry forms, GPS, LiDAR scanning, drone flight data, photography, photogrammetry, and video to produce records and digital assets that are integrated into an open-access online archive. These are accessible through the project website and permanently archived in the Kyoto University and the University of Oxford library systems.
This lecture introduces the project methodology and the dataset in ways that highlight its potential as a resource for historians, anthropologists, architects, and scholars of other fields, as well as its use to date by government agencies, NGOs, and local communities across the region.
Join us to discover how technology and culture converge to safeguard our maritime heritage!
Speaker: Prof. R. Michael Feener is a Professor of Cross-Regional Studies at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University and an Associate Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. (Please click here for a detailed biography.)
Department of Chinese and History, City University of Hong Kong