Documenting heritage in the 21st century: the EAMENA project and its potential for ‘big data’ research in Levantine archaeology

Introduction The Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project (www.eamena.org) is among the most ambitious archaeological documentation projects ever to have taken place across the Middle East and North Africa. The project, under the current directorship of Bill Finlayson (2015–2021 director Robert Bewley), is funded by the Arcadia Fund (Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin, grant number 4178). It started as a collaboration between the universities of Oxford (PI: Andrew Wilson) and Leicester (Co-PI: David Mattingly), with Durham joining shortly afterwards (Co-PI: Graham Philip). In addition, extensive partnerships exist across the MENA region that were strengthened as a result of a series of training workshops funded by the UK’s Cultural Protection Fund (CPF), administered by the British Council on behalf of the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. At the core of EAMENA’s methodology is archaeological survey, primarily using remote sensing sources (satellite imagery and aerial photographs), stretching from Mauretania to Iran (Fig. 1). Funding for the project was obtained in the aftermath of the 2010–2011 Arab Spring and during the rise of the so-called Islamic State group, which resulted in deliberate destruction of cultural heritage as well as damage through, for example, neglect following political instability. As travel (and therefore reliance on field survey) to some parts of the MENA region had become more restricted or impossible, the remote sensing methodology of the EAMENA project offered an alternative approach. In addition to fulfilling an urgent heritage management need, the overarching research vision of the EAMENA project is to take the scale of archaeological analysis in the MENA region to a new level in terms of big data. As such, it fulfils a major aim of the Arcadia Fund, which is primarily interested in the documentation of endangered aspects of the natural and cultural world and the promotion of open-access information to preserve knowledge (www.arcadiafund.org.uk/). This vision fits perfectly with the general trend towards the generation of large digital datasets that lies at the heart of the emergence of big data approaches over the last two decades. The collection of papers in this Special Issue is the result of an initial exploration of the research potential contained within the project’s open access Arches database. The EAMENA project builds on the success of previous remote-sensing research projects in the region — for example, the Fragile Crescent (e.g., Galiatsatos et al. 2009; Wilkinson et al. 2014) and the Trans-Saharan (e.g., Mattingly and Sterry 2013; Mattingly et al. 2013) projects — and other data collation initiatives across the globe, that attempt to make sense of the ever-increasing mass of archaeological information that is available today. The increase in data quantity globally in the current ‘Age of Information’ is widespread. Within the discipline of archaeology, contributing factors include, but are not restricted to, improved heritage legislation and increased awareness of the importance School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Institute for Preand Proto-History and Excellence Cluster ROOTS, Christian Albrechts University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany; McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.