Mapping Archaeology While Mapping an Empire: Using Historical Maps to Reconstruct Ancient Settlement Landscapes in Modern India and Pakistan

Abstract

A range of data sources are now used to support the process of archaeological prospection, including remote sensed imagery, spy satellite photographs and aerial photographs. This paper advocates the value and importance of a hitherto under-utilised historical mapping resource—the Survey of India 1” to 1-mile map series, which was based on surveys started in the mid–late nineteenth century, and published progressively from the early twentieth century AD. These maps present a systematic documentation of the topography of the British dominions in the South Asian Subcontinent. Incidentally, they also documented the locations, the height and area of thousands of elevated mounds that were visible in the landscape at the time that the surveys were carried out, but have typically since been either damaged or destroyed by the expansion of irrigation agriculture and urbanism. Subsequent reanalysis has revealed that many of these mounds were actually the remains of ancient settlements. The digitisation and analysis of these historic maps thus creates a unique opportunity for gaining insight into the landscape archaeology of South Asia. This paper reviews the context within which these historical maps were created, presents a method for georeferencing them, and reviews the symbology that was used to represent elevated mound features that have the potential to be archaeological sites. This paper should be read in conjunction with the paper by Arnau Garcia et al. in the same issue of Geosciences, which implements a research programme combining historical maps and a range of remote sensing approaches to reconstruct historical landscape dynamics in the Indus River Basin.

Remote Sensing and Historical Morphodynamics of Alluvial Plains. The 1909 Indus Flood and the City of Dera Ghazi Khan (Province of Punjab, Pakistan)

“…The documents produced by the British colonial authorities provide a unique testimony of the flood episode in 1909. In the process of developing colonial rule, the British authorities undertook a huge and systematic collection of data to describe the acquired territories, including the compilation of detailed District Gazetteers and the systematic mapping of the area by the Survey of India [28]. That effort served the practical need of providing information to officials appointed to administer a territory and people about which they often had limited previous knowledge.…”

“…A second type of documents are the cartographic material produced by the Survey of India (SoI). The processes involved in the creation of the SoI and the characteristics of the materials produced are presented in another paper presented in this volume [28].…”

“…The whole area is also covered by two maps from the US Army Map Service, Series U502 (1955). Georeferenciation of these maps has been carried out following the process described by the authors in a paper published in this same volume [28]. Ground control points (GCPs) were obtained using the high-resolution images available through QGIS world imagery map services.…”

“…The chronological focus of the study is the nineteenth and twentieth centuries AD, a period for which historical documentation allows the reconstruction of both the history of the settlement and the changes in the river landscapes in considerable detail. The selection of this chronological span makes it possible to explore the approaches to integrating recent historical datasets, and this paper acts as a companion piece in the same issue that explores the potential for historic maps for the detection of archaeological sites [28].…”

Structure-from-Motion (SFM) Photogrammetry as a Non-Invasive Methodology to Digitalize Historical Documents: A Highly Flexible and Low-Cost Approach?

“…Historical documents represent an important source of information about our past as well as an invaluable component of our cultural heritage. In particular, in recent years historical cartography has increasingly become a useful source for many research fields such as geomorphology [1,2], geoarchaeology [3,4] and geoheritage [5] to understand the human-induced modification on the landscape through time. Ageing is the main problem for the conservation of fragile material used to create this kind of geographic datasets.…”