During the last meeting in June as part of the PCMA Seminar series, Pablo Gutiérrez de León Juberías from the Spanish National Research Council will present a lecture entitled “Looking at heritage from above. Documenting and interpreting the north-eastern Horn of Africa’s heritage using field surveys, excavations and remote sensing”. This will be the last meeting devoted to the Eastern Desert and the Red Sea region, and it will be hosted by Dr. Mariusz Gwiazda.
Abstract: “Landscapes in the north-eastern Horn of Africa are enormous cemeteries with extreme complexity, where the Islamic tombs are scattered and share common ground with pre-Islamic monumental stone cairns, all gathered in key locations like wadis, crossroads or trade routes and are arranged in palimpsests. During the last three years working in Somaliland and Djibouti, we have been documenting, combining remote sensing and field surveys, diverse trends in nomadic funerary architecture in areas currently occupied by Somalis.
Using this work as a base, this talk aims to present: first, the ongoing general mapping of funerary architecture in the north-eastern Horn of Africa. This has been gathered by photointerpretation and field surveys. Second, to clarify in which way it could help us in the understanding of the nomadic funerary architecture, which is abundant on the landscapes of the Somali-speaking countries but often forgotten and highly affected by looting. Furthermore, we look forward to setting the pillars of a dialogue amongst scholars on how we could further use this information in the future to build a data base of religious, civic and funerary structures, in coordination with the different governments and how it could help us in the protection of the Somali heritage.”
The seminar will be held in online form on Thursday, 29st June at 2 pm Warsaw time (UTC+2) on Zoom.
To obtain a link, please write to the PCMA UW office: pcma@uw.edu.pl