Mapping Damage

Acronym: MAPDAM

Description

Damages and changes are silent testimonies of actions and actors in the past and provide crucial information to safeguarding policies and musealization. MAPDAM Project focuses on the concept of damage and destruction both as a modern phenomenon caused by conflict and economic crisis and as a past event that determined major changes in the history of a region.

The research will focus on the region of Tartus in Syria, a coastal area that has experienced in the past ten years conflict and economic crisis. Main goals are both to provide reliable data to safeguard the archaeological heritage and to increase the historical, geographical, and archaeological knowledge of the area in pre-classical and classical periods.

Based on an interdisciplinary approach, using an open access webgis, the Project explores damages and patterns of changes at three different scales (macro, meso, and micro-scale). The long-term major outcome of the Project is a renewed shared awareness of the causes of damage and decay, of the economic and social, as well as cultural, dimension of the damage in the archaeological field, impacting not only the scientific community but also local social groups.