Welcome to the Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) database. The database is populated with archaeological sites documented by the EAMENA project, supported since 2015 by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and from 2017 with additional support from the British Council’s Cultural Protection Fund (CPF). The project is led by the University of Oxford in partnership with the Universities of Leicester and Durham; it also works very closely with the Maritime Endangered Archaeology project (MarEA), based in Southampton and Ulster Universities, whose data is entered and held in the same database.
The initial impetus for the EAMENA project was in recognition of the global threats to cultural heritage. However, the database is not restricted to sites that are directly under threat. Rather, the purpose of the database is to record all sites within the areas in which we work because it is only once sites have been documented that they can be protected. In order to monitor potential threats, assess the priority of individual sites and decide where to focus resources for preservation and protection, heritage authorities must know what archaeological resources exist and where they are located.
Register to access the EAMENA database.
Many of the sites in the database are previously unrecorded, having been discovered through the use of remote sensing techniques, which provides the primary tool for new survey work conducted by the EAMENA and MarEA projects. The database also includes sites which have already been recorded or published in various sources and have been digitised for inclusion in the database. With all of these data brought together into a single system, the EAMENA database provides a significant new tool for cultural heritage management and archaeological research.
Access to the database requires registration, with three main categories of users: General Public, Academic Researchers, and Editing/Management Users. The core of the database is Open Access, but certain data are of a sensitive nature and therefore only available to selected users. We welcome initiatives for research collaboration.