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H2020Individual fellowship2021–2024

CaDHoKUHL · Characterising and Dating Hong Kong's Upland Historic Landscapes

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2021-09-01 → 2024-08-31
EU contribution
€337,401
Participants
1
Scheme
MSCA-IF

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Results in brief

Characterising and Dating Hong Kong's Upland Historic Landscapes

In Hong Kong, the territory’s outmoded sites-buildings-monuments-focused cultural heritage legislation and a lowland archaeological research bias has meant that upland landscapes, which contain evidence of past human exploitation but are conventionally valued for their natural heritage, have remained poorly understood by archaeologists and were thus potentially at risk. In order to address this gap in knowledge, the CaDHoKUHL project employed a GIS-based remote sensing study to identify and map ancient cultivation terraces in 2 distinctive forms in Hong Kong’s uplands and applied an historic landscape characterisation (HLC) to the uplands and surrounding lowlands. Geoarchaeological fieldwork involving optically stimulated luminescence profiling and dating (OSL-PD) revealed a 1,300-year chronology for the human exploitation of Hong Kong’s uplands. Intra-regional comparison of HK’s upland cultivation terraces with local slope risk data indicate that the terraces played an important role in the sustainable management of slope stability and soil conservation. An inter-regional review of the archaeological literature on upland cultivation terraces in East-Southeast Asia suggested that the 2 terrace forms identified in HK are locally distinctive solutions to a desire to economically exploit HK’s uplands. Key societal outcomes for the study region include fostering better integrated approaches to the management of Hong Kong’s cultural and natural heritage, while also providing data to support the work of a diversity of local stakeholders concerned with landscape and community resilience and adaptation to climate change.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

In tropical East and Southeast Asia, traditional settlement and land-use practices have created highly distinctive historic landscapes, especially in upland areas. This important cultural heritage remains largely unstudied by archaeologists and is consequently both undervalued and at risk. The “CaDHoKUHL” project will address this gap in knowledge by adopting an innovative GIS-based interdisciplinary approach combining landscape archaeology, geosciences, historical research, remote sensing, scientific dating and digital geospatial analysis. Its case-study will be Hong Kong (HK), where the mountainous hinterlands of the densely-populated coastal metropolis have conventionally been regarded as a ‘natural’ landscape, but this is a false picture: historic aerial photos and state-of-the-art remote sensing data reveal upland historic landscapes with features evidencing a diversity of past human activities. Dr Mick Atha (hereafter “the researcher”) will move from HK to the McCord Centre for Landscape at Newcastle University (UNEW) in the UK. There, with supervision by Prof. Sam Turner, he will receive in-depth specialist training in the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a means to integrate and analyse a diversity of archaeological, historical, and remote sensing datasets and learn how to use Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC), a method of spatial analysis developed by the host institution. In addition, the researcher will also receive training in geoarchaeological and geochronological methods which, together with the GIS-based use of statistical algorithms, will allow the dating and modelling of upland landscape change through time. The training he receives will not only support original analyses and contribute substantially to archaeological knowledge in HK and the wider region, but will also significantly advance his goal of a reigniting a Europe-based career in interdisciplinary landscape studies and cutting-edge landscape archaeology research.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE · Newcastle Upon TyneCoordinatorUnited Kingdom

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union