Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia

By Indu Lakshmi Prasad, CHASE funded doctoral researcher at Birkbeck

I recently concluded my placement with Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia or the MAHSA project, housed in the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge. The PI for the project is Prof. Cameron Petrie, who is a leading archaeologist in the Indus Valley and adjacent sites in the region. The remit of the project is to document the endangered archaeology and cultural heritage of the Indus River Basin and the surrounding areas and publish this information in an Open Access Arches geospatial database by leveraging both current and legacy topographical surveys. My placement journey started with listening to others’ experiences during the CHASE Encounters conference in the autumn of 2023. At around the same time, I attended an online conference at the British Library in November last year, hosted by the Steppe Sisters Network, where MAHSA was represented by Dr Rebecca Roberts, who spoke about their work. The idea and the scope of the project intersected to a large extent with my own research into the history of archaeology in the region and a personal interest in cartography. I had heard from earlier placement experiences that if a suitable opportunity could be sourced by the student, it could be put forth to CHASE for approval. With this in mind, I initiated a conversation with MAHSA and found that they were very willing to explore a placement opportunity. Once we had established that a placement would be beneficial to both my own research skills as well as contribute to the project itself, it was a matter of getting the approvals from CHASE and executing a placement agreement between my college, Birkbeck (University of London) and MAHSA. Despite all this converging just before the end of term in December, I received great support from CHASE and Birkbeck to finalise all the paperwork in time. And I started my placement in the first week of January 2024. In all, it had taken about 6 weeks between finding an opportunity and completing the required steps. Throughout this process, I had the complete backing and guidance of my supervisors Dr Kate Franklin and Dr Esther Breithoff, who ensured that I could balance my time between my research and the placement. An additional consideration for the placement was also that I am an international student. The visa regulations stipulated that it could not be a full-time placement, it had to be part-time. My placement supervisor at MAHSA and I determined that a period of six-months would be sufficient time to meet the specific set of outcomes and scope we had mapped. Broadly, my placement would be used to catalogue archival sources to surface the "hidden" or lesser-known contributions of the South Asian surveyors in colonial archaeology in South Asia, including the surveys and maps they created. In addition, I also received training on GIS and Arches databases, to understand the vast network of cartographical sources that MAHSA worked with. I started by doubling down on my archival research in the Bodleian, the Cambridge UL, the British Library and various other expedition-related archives from the period. I got to also work with the MAHSA team on enabling or surfacing these forgotten surveyors and their contributions, a framework that the MAHSA team is working on currently. The archival catalogue, I have created during my placement, is a starting point that allows the MAHSA team to work further to surface the very significant contributions from the indigenous surveyors. It also engages with and challenges the narratives of archaeological and cultural histories of the region, which are still largely Euro-centric, to balance it with more nuance. For myself, the work over the last six months will result in a conference paper that has already been accepted, a journal paper, two story maps - all of which are in progress right now. It has also given me an opportunity to see the important work in heritage management enabled by technology, drawing a line from the surveyors of the previous centuries to archaeological heritage today. Finally, even though my placement itself has concluded, my continuing research into the history of archaeology enables me to have an ongoing engagement with the MAHSA team in the future.