Planning the future of a Unesco site: setting a model for the protection of a World Heritage site as a node of multidisciplinar scientific research and laboratory for social integration, international cooperation, landscape preservation and cultural dissemination
Descrizione
The project aims at providing an innovative model of good practice in Public Archaeology for the protection, conservation and increase in public awareness of archaeological sites of the UNESCO World Heritage list, and at the same time enhance international scientific and socio-cultural cooperation. The site of Arslantepe, in the Malatya plain in Turkey, which is an open-air museum of the UNESCO list since 2021, is proposed as a case study. At Arslantepe we shall elaborate and test an integrated project of protection of the site that will provide a solid reference study for future planning at other sites; a composite way of dealing with Cultural Heritage for present and future generations, integrating scientific research and conservation with needs and expectations of society, and working with direct commitment of the local communities. Scientific research is carried out regularly at the site by a mainly Italian archaeological expedition since 1961 and its continuous collaboration with the Turkish institutions has proven to be the key for the exceptional conservation of the site and for the construction of a solid mutual trust and cultural interaction
Finalità
The project aims at setting a model for the protection of a World Heritage site as a node of multi-disciplinary scientific research and as a laboratory for social integration, international cooperation, landscape preservation, cultural dissemination and technological innovation, applied at a case study in the UNESCO site of Arslantepe.
Three main lines of activities will be carried out by the three units involved in the project:
RU 1 – Sapienza University will develop and test a program of protection of the site through raising awareness and promoting participated activities with local citizens, schools, universities, museums and local administrations. A multi-disciplinary survey of the resilient traditional heritage of the village surrounding the mound will be carried out and inserted into a Geographic Information System (GIS), where to merge and compare data from the modern town and from the ancient settlement of Arslantepe in the aim of creating a virtual (but also living) laboratory of memory preservation and identity building.
RU 2 – Tuscia University of Viterbo will carry out a landscape analysis, design and implement a database associated with a GIS, aimed at extracting maps of environmental risks for the UNESCO protected area (buffer zone of 1km around the site).
RU 3 – Roma Tre University will plan and test an innovative geoarchaeological monitoring system (Geoarchaeological Monitoring Smart System with the installation of an IoT environmental sensor network) to measure and control the main environmental parameters that can potentially generate degradation phenomena of the archeological monuments at the site This will provide feedback to the conservators working at the site to improve preservation protocols.
Risultati attesi
The expected outcomes stem from three interrelated milestones:
Milestone 1 Promote the development of a living socio-cultural laboratory in the Village of Orduzu
Milestone 2 GIS for the extraction of maps of the environmental and anthropic risks faced by Arslantepe and its territory
Milestone 3 iImplementation of a geoarchaeological monitoring system (GMSS Geoarchaeological Monitoring Smart System)
Stato dell’arte
Cultural heritage preservation is today widely considered as tightly intertwined with environmental and social sustainability; whilst this is now common knowledge within the scientific community and has also been acknowledged by international institutions (i.e. EU), implementation of local policies in this sense is still rare. In order to provide an effective and enduring sustainable growth, cultural institutions must plan integrated actions and practices aimed at achieving specific environmental, social, cultural and economic objectives.
In the current historical phase, it has become evident to the scientific community involved in research related to all aspects of the Cultural Heritage that beside lines of scientific and academic investigation, innovative ways of promoting the preservation and dissemination with an active involvement of the local communities needs to be pursued (Moshenska 2017), together with the development of new technologies specifically adjusted for each case’s necessity. This is even more true for archaeological sites whose historical relevance is recognized as part of the UNESCO world heritage List, in the protection of which, researchers can no longer skip their responsibility and are called to collaborate with the public institutions. In the field of archaeology and studies on the ancient past, the necessity of new forms of politically engaged and on-the-ground fieldwork has become a contemporary challenge and new hybrid field methods such as participatory mapping or radical cartographies representing territory as a network of relations, public, community-based and engaged archaeological projects (Atalay et al. 2014) and archaeologies of political ecology (Bangstad 2022) have been proposed as innovative and creative ways to connect past landscapes to the historical and contemporary politics of heritage (Harmanșah 2022).
Public awareness and involvement, is a key to the protection of sites from natural and anthropic risks too, as preparedness is considered as one of the most effective strategies for the prevention of damage. Before public awareness may take place though, a detailed research of specific risks of the chosen context should be carried out, as practices for the protection of Cultural Heritage cannot lie in the mere recurrence of a supposed “standardized” practice but must be adjusted for each single case in its context. The analysis of each single case represents, an essential step in the development of good practices for risk strategy protocols, whose effectiveness should be tested in the immediate and longue-durée (Frangipane-Tuna 2022), but which should also serve as a base to dialogue with local administrations for the integration of cultural heritage protection measures into more general risk management strategies
Taking into consideration these premises, the case study here proposed is particularly relevant both for its historical importance and for the more than 60 year-long data collection that the international scientific team directed by Sapienza University has accumulated, and which forms a solid base to test innovative and integrated methodologies of protection and conservation.
The site of Arslantepe is a unique example of tangible, well preserved, and still visible expression of the rise, in the 4th millennium BCE, of a new type of State society with new political institutions, based on a Palatial complex, that is the earliest example of public Palace known so far worldwide. It is today one of the rare sites in which people walk through the still standing mud brick walls, over 3 mt high, admiring the wall paintings, temples and storage rooms. The site was inhabited uninterruptedly from 4500 BCE to 712 BCE; it has thus been spectator and actor throughout most of East Anatolian history. The mound is inserted in the modern rural village of Orduzu, in the beautiful, still rather uncontaminated but at risk of urban crawling landscape of the Malatya plain, surrounded by mountains and opening towards the Euphrates valley. Some of the houses along the street bringing to the site are still mud-brick buildings and have been recently catalogued by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and restored by the Malatya Governorate, thus preserving some of the few still maintained examples of this important traditional architecture and demonstrating the sensibility of local administrations to the value of their heritage. A Turkish funded project carried out by project collaborator Aysun Tuna between 2019-2020 has started to map all environmental and historical assets of the territory and shall serve as a base for activities by RU2.
It is in this context that the present project intends to promote the much theorized but less often put in practice cultural operation of implementing a model for a participated and sustainable preservation of the tangible and intangible heritage of Arslantepe and its surroundings.
Riferimento: PRIN 2022 PNRR – Codice progetto P2022PNWYW – CUP F53D23010690001
Investimento totale del progetto: € 230.765
Partner/proponente: Università La Sapienza, Roma Prof. Lucia Mori
Coordinatore dell’UdR Università degli Studi Roma Tre: Prof. Guido Giordano
