Digitisation / Cataloguing of non-textual objects: Digital archive on archaeology and environmental history of north-eastern and south-western Africa

• Applicant: Dr. Tilman Lenssen-Erz (†)
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 203805410

For more than 50 years the Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Cologne has conducted archaeological research in Africa. While first rock art research commenced in Namibia in 1963, in the early 1980s another focus of research was established in north-eastern Africa. Until that point both areas largely had been terra incogita of prehistoric investigations. The concentration of various projects was partly on rock art and partly on the human-environment relations. Projects with an international reputation and funding by the DFG were e.g. "The Rock Paintings of the Upper Brandberg" (1977-1985) and "Settlement History of the Eastern Sahara" (B.O.S., 1979- 1993) as well as the Collaborative Research Centre 389 ACACIA (1995-2007). The African Archaeology, which was founded in 1984, hosts rich collections of finds, excavation documentations, tracings and photos from these larger projects as well as materials from individual projects. In top of this there are also materials from external sources and projects. All these witnesses of African archaeology and environmental history meet with high international interest, notwithstanding the fact that the essential results of the research projects have been published extensively: 15 large scale monographs have been published on southern African rock art and its archaeological context, and another 13 monographs on the Holocene prehistory of north-eastern Africa. However, a sustainable and standardized manner of archiving of the basic materials was missing. With its start in 2012 the DFG-funded project AAArC (African Archaeology Archive Cologne) has endeavoured to archive the rich inventory of archaeological materials in state of the art technology. In cooperation with Arachne, the online archive of the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne, large parts of the African Archaeology collections have been digitized and made accessible to the public in the open access archive. This archive is not only a picture database but also serves the comprehensive presentation of data and documents which thus are made accessible for archaeological analysis. Digital data other than pictures, however, require special tools in order to make them accessible on the same level as pictures. For this reason another 18 months of funding are applied for to secure the full functionality and operability of AAArC. This way materials and documents become accessible to the scientific community and in particular to colleagues and students in the African partner countries. At the same time partly unique photos can be saved from decay, the oldest pictures of the collection originating from 1947.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)