Applications of Geospatial Technology in the Management of Cultural Heritage Sites – Potentials and Challenges for the Indian Region

Cultural heritage management can be defined as all the processes in understanding (through knowing and identifying), conserving and managing various expressions of cultural heritage. These expressions could be intangible like traditional skills, crafts, folklore, rituals, etc. or tangible like objects or places. Objects including artefacts, murals and sculptures are defined as movable cultural property, while structures, monuments, precincts, water bodies and canals are called sites and also termed as immovable cultural property. Emerging technologies and scientific developments are increasingly being used in the management of these different expressions of cultural heritage. For example, heritage object databases that link source, provenance and current location are proving useful in museum contexts, predictive technologies are being used to fill in partially missing sections of murals/ inscriptions or aid virtual reconstruction of object remains or even something as basic as mapping indigenous processional routes. However, the expression of cultural heritage as immovable cultural property or heritage sites appears to render itself most to analysis through various techniques available under the large umbrella of geospatial technology. This is because of the nature of such heritage – structures are necessarily built in particular geographical and cultural settings, presumably based on appropriate site selection in order to suitably locate them and their components, and the initially planned layout and subsequent additions would have a spatial spread – these factors combined with the locational permanence of the structures relative to movable property make built heritage well-disposed for geospatial analysis. This review article therefore explores the use and applicability of geospatial technology for the management of built cultural heritage, including its context and environment.