Finding and Protecting Heritage Resources: Predictive Modeling in Sabodala, Senegal.

Like many other countries in West Africa, Senegal is struggling to balance
encouraging resource development with protecting cultural heritage.
Because little systematic archaeological research has been performed in
Senegal, the heritage resources of many areas, particularly those in the mining
belt of eastern Senegal, are virtually unknown in terms of site distribution,
chronology, and cultural affiliation. Under these circumstances, government
agencies might assume that no heritage resources exist in a proposed
mining concession and allow development to proceed without any investigation.
The first step in heritage resource protection, therefore, must be
to identify and evaluate heritage resources that occur in proposed development
areas. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, used under
the rubric of predictive modeling, provides an efficient and cost effective
tool for this purpose. Predictive modeling uses existing information on heritage
resources and the local landscape to predict the number and locations of
settlements and resource loci and to infer cultural behaviors that may have
produced these distributions. The models generated by this process are evaluated
by on-the-ground sample surveys, test excavations, and ethnographic
interviews.

The new data derived from the evaluation are incorporated into
the model to identify those areas that are potentially most sensitive to
development (have the highest density or most important sites) and those
areas that may be directly affected by development, as well as to assess
survey adequacy. This information is used to advise agencies and developers
of areas that should be avoided or otherwise protected, thereby enhancing
the potential to preserve heritage resources for future generations. In this
tial to preserve heritage resources for future generations. In this presentation,
we discuss the methods and results of recent investigations in the Sabodala
region of southeast Senegal where SRI, in association with Nexus Heritage
and the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), developed and tested
a predictive model of heritage resources at risk in a mining concession..