Fudging Maps at Jam

The minaret and archaeological remains at Jam, in central Afghanistan, were nominated as Afghanistan's first World Heritage site in 2002. The nomination was successful despite the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)'s reservations about the quality and completeness of the nomination document: in particular, ICOMOS was concerned about the rudimentary mapping and imprecise definition of the site, which has not been surveyed systematically or in detail. The extensive, but largely undocumented, looting of the site over the past two decades has further complicated archaeological investigations there. The key goals of the fieldwork I coordinated at Jam in 2003 and 2005, therefore, included an 'on the ground' re-appraisal of the extent of the site and the mapping issues, and an assessment of the looting. In particular, I wanted to determine whether it was possible to utilize the robber holes as a source of information, both of localized sub-surface remains, and as an indication of the broader spatial limits of the site. This was based on the premise that looters only continue to dig in areas where they are finding sufficient artefacts to warrant their efforts. I also hoped to correlate the robber holes we documented on the ground with those visible in the high resolution satellite imagery of the site. This would enable us to study a larger area than it was practical to survey during our short field seasons given the mountainous terrain, and simultaneously to generate a base-line against which any further looting of the site could be monitored. The fieldwork revealed that the base map used in the World Heritage Nomination document is flawed – the actual site is about a third of the size of that delineated on the map, and when the GPS points we took are plotted on the map, they often occur hundreds of metres from their actual location. A similar problem arose when we attempted to overlay the GPS points on the high resolution satellite image of the site. The latter problem was partially solved when we ortho-rectified the central portion of the image but the complex, deeply incised topography of the mountainous region limited the size of the area we were able to rectify. Since it is currently not possible to return to Jam to undertake a proper topographic survey of the site, the best way to 'fudge' the problems of integrating existing cartographic sources, the satellite imagery and a range …