Archaeology in Danger

The Temple of Baal, before & after destruction by ISIS

In 2015 ISIS destroyed the Temple of Baal in the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. This pointless destruction of a World Heritage site briefly managed to turn the world's attention towards the danger faced by archaeological sites around the world, particularly in North Africa and the Middle East.

Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East & North Africa (EAMENA) is a database of over 20,000 archaeological sites under threat. The database is a joint project by Oxford, Leicester and Durham Universities. The spatial database itself was created using Arches, an open-source geospatially-enabled software platform for cultural heritage inventory.

Using the EAMENA interactive map you can search the database for endangered archaeological sites by location. EAMENA also includes a list of popular searches which provides access to themed searches of the database, such as the 'destroyed sites' search which returns 3,314 sites that EAMENA judges to have already been completely destroyed.