2010 Fellows
GHF supported a number of Fellows through the Global Heritage Preservation Fellowship Program in 2010. Conducting fieldwork at cultural heritage sites throughout the developing world, these inspiring researchers are making valuable contributions to heritage preservation and sustainability. To learn more about each of the 2010 Fellows, see below.
Haiming Yan – Fujian Tulou, China
Haiming Yan, a PhD candidate in sociology at University of Virginia, is interested in the impact that heritage tourism has upon the local community. Haiming’s research focuses specifically on the inscribed world heritage site, Fujian Tulou. By comparing the state of preservation and human uses of other similar clusters throughout China, Haiming has furthered our understanding of how the process of world heritage inscription affects the local community, a vital consideration for sustainable preservation.
Kawshik Saha – Khalifatabad, Bangladesh
Kawshik Saha conducted work to stabilize the historic structures within the 15th century city of Khalifatabad. Saha is a lecturer in architecture at the Leading University, Sylhet, Bangladesh. The heritage of the city is poorly-managed and lacks funding or planning for conservation efforts. While an aim of the project is to develop plans for conservation and tourism, the project did so by engaging and training the local community in conserving and managing archaeological sites. The result is a sustainable network of skilled conservators drawn from the local community to safeguard the heritage of Khalifatabd.
Matt Sayre – Chavin de Huantar, Peru
Land erosion is a serious risk to archaeological sites worldwide. Chavín de Huántar, Perú is one such site where numerous invasive species of plants have led to soil erosion, impacting efforts at site conservation. Through GHF-funding, Matt Sayre inventoried the numerous indigenous and invasive species of plants in hopes of developing a model to control land movement through the use of indigenous plants. Sayre received his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and is former post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. He will be an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Dakota come Fall 2011.
Muhammad Safdar Khan – Taxila, Pakistan
Muhammad Safdar Khan, Chair of the Department of Conservation Studies at Hazara University in Pakistan, plans to focus on the many threats which face the site of Taxila, Pakistan. Taxila, once inhabited by Greeks, Mauryans and Kushans, is now threatened by natural hazards, inadequate management and vandalism, among many other threats. Khan’s analysis of the many threats will inform much needed conservation and management plans.
Paul Mupira – Ziwa National Monument, Zimbabwe
Having studied at both the University of Zimbabwe and Cambridge, the regional director for the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, Paul Mupira, has set out to systematically document the threats to the many stone walls of the Ziwa National Monument. Little information currently exists on how to conserve the unique masonry found at the site and there have been no previous attempts at site monitoring. Mupira’s work has supplied important baseline data to develop effective monitoring strategies in the future.
Marija Stankovska-Tzamali - Tatićev Kamen, Macedonia
Marija Stankovska-Tzamali, with the collaboration of the National Museum of Kumanovo, has shed new light on our understanding of the Bronze Age site of Tatićev Kamen in the Republic of Macedonia. Stankovska-Tzamali, with a Ph.D. from University Paris IV-Sorbonne, has already created a management plan for the site in 2007. Further research and excavation has revealed much about the traditional religious practices at the site and the extent of remains. Using this newly acquired data, Stankovska-Tzamali was able to document the site and revise its management plan in order to ensure effective conservation by the National Museum of Kumanovo.
Emma Cunliffe - Syria
Emma Cunliffe, a Ph.D. researcher at Durham University, has an on-going research interest in Syria and has recently analyzed the effectiveness of remote sensing for site management. By ground-truthing satellite images of archaeological sites in Syria, Cunliffe assessed the opportunities for remote sensing in identifying and monitoring threats to archaeology. Not only does Cunliffe’s research have implications both for archaeology in general and Syria specifically, Cunliffe presented her findings at the Broadening Horizons Conference in Barcelona, sharing with other researchers techniques that are becoming increasingly important for archaeological site management.
Veysel Apaydin - Çatalhöyük and Ani, Turkey
While Çatalhöyük and Ani have long been areas of regular archaeological research, the local community has not always been involved or engaged. Veysel Apaydin, a Ph.D. researcher at University College London, studied this directly through interviews with both the general public and administrative and academic officials. Apaydin has identified an absence of community education in archaeology and the reasons for this absence. The results of Apaydin’s research describe the need for increased public education as an essential element of archaeological work in the region.
Christian Eggleton – Banteay Chhmar, Cambodia
An important part of GHF’s work continues to be the mapping of threatened sites. Crhistian Eggleton, a Master’s graduate from University California, Berkeley, conducted an extensive GPS survey of Banteay Chhmar. The survey identified previously-unknown surface features which shed light on existing research questions. During the project, local archaeologists were trained in survey techniques and the equipment used was left in Cambodia. This has provided the physical and intellectual tools to ensure that the work Eggleton began can be continued by the local archaeologists.
Tiffin Thompson - Gordion, Turkey
Tiffin Thompson recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Masters of Science in Historic Preservation and will be returning to school in the fall of 2011 to begin a Masters of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. While at Penn, she studied the history and theory of preservation while focusing on building conservation. During the summer of 2010, Tiffin traveled to Turkey to conduct research for her thesis, which was on the 9th century BCE pebble mosaic from Gordion, Turkey—the oldest known mosaic in the world. Tiffin’s work in Turkey included: cleaning the mosaic, (currently housed in a museum near the site), creating a photographic montage of over a hundred images of the mosaic, and documenting the current conditions by conducting a detailed conditions survey. Her thesis attempts to provide a written history of the pavement, identify and analyze the condition that have and are affecting its condition and preservation, find and critique comparable projects that can help guide future work on the mosaic, and propose a phased schedule that can be used to facilitate the conservation of the unique mosaic.
