Spatial risk assessment and the protection of cultural heritage in southern Tajikistan

Growing digital documentation of cultural heritage resources yielded from an increasing number of international projects, calls for the development of formal computational approaches to assess the risks that this invaluable material heritage is exposed to. This paper proposes a nuanced case-control approach to the risk assessment developed by the Central Asian Archaeological Landscape (CAAL) project for an area in southern Tajikistan. A number of statistical methods are applied for the spatial modelling of the risk to the cultural heritage across the study area and for the assessment of the local scenarios of potential archaeological features already affected by natural and human threats. The value of this formal approach is in its flexible applicability to diverse regional and national settings, as well as in its capability of being updated and repeated within the same territory. This provides local stakeholders, heritage professionals, and local authorities, with a useful tool to develop a risk management plan that includes quantitative as well as qualitative spatial assessments. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Publi? par Elsevier Masson SAS. Cet article est publi? en Open Access sous licence CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

This paper introduces a nuanced case-control approach to assess the risks faced by cultural heritage. Statistical methods are used for spatial modeling, and assessing threatened archaeological features. The method's flexibility and adaptability make it a valuable tool for risk management in various settings.