Characterising and Dating Hong Kong's Upland Historic Landscapes

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.