The Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project is funded by the Arcadia Fund and by the British Council's Cultural Protection Fund and it is based at the Universities of Oxford, Leicester and Durham.
EAMENA’s primary aim is to rapidly record and evaluate the status of the archaeological landscape of the MENA region in order to create an accessible body of data which can be used by national and international heritage professionals to target those sites most in danger and better plan and implement the preservation and protection of this heritage.
EAMENA’s spatial database, based on a modified Arches platform, will provide the fundamental information for each site, including the level of risk and how each site relates to one another. It will be accessible to all heritage professionals and institutions with an interest and passion for the wonderfully rich and diverse archaeological heritage of the Middle East and North Africa. Not all damage and threats to the archaeology can be prevented, but they can be mitigated and so at the core of our project is the desire for excellence in heritage management. To this end, EAMENA works with relevant authorities on the ground to limit likely damage, share information and skills, strengthen networks and raise awareness. Fieldwork and outreach are essential components of the project and the EAMENA team will target investigations to the most threatened sites, visiting (where possible) to assess site conditions, make detailed records and liaise with national authorities to share data and findings.
The EAMENA Github repo contains both the EAMENA app and the Arches app root files. The former is a modified version of the Arches HIP app. The latter contains several changes, most of which project-specific, to the underlying Arches codebase (e.g. inclusion of new database models).
Note: If you are planning to install the EAMENA app only, you may do so by first of all following the Arches installation instructions available here, then by installing the Arches HIP package (instructions here). Once you have done this, and have created your app, download the codebase from this repo and replace the content of your app folder with that of eamena/eamena. If you are planning to test the Arches root codebase changes adapted by the EAMENA project, you may do so by overwriting the arches folder in your system's virtual environement with the arches folder present in this repo under ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages/arches
Visit EAMENA at www.eamena.org or eamena.arch.ox.ac.uk
** Andrea Zerbini ** andrea.zerbini@arch.ox.ac.uk