IPAMED

Project: IPAMED (Inventaire du Patrimoine de la Méditerranée)
Site: Bir M’sharga

The IPAMED (Inventaire du Patrimoine de la Méditerranée) project, presented in the context of the “Euromed Heritage I” program and financed by the European Community in relation to a project to exploit the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean area, aimed at the creation of a computerized cartography of Tunisia, which in executing the design, focused on a zone that corresponds with the northeastern area of Tunisia.

The programme was implemented thanks to partnerships of:
- Institut National du Patrimoine (INP), Tunisia
- Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino (CST), Italy
- Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France.

Developed in the three-year period 1999-2001, among the principal objects of the project was the training of a team of technicians for the management of the archaeological heritage, able to utilize the modern technologies in relation to the Geographic Information System (or GIS) as applied to a cultural heritage . The participants from several Mediterranean nations (Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine, Syria) were trained by Italian, French and Tunisian experts in the various sectors pertaining to the project (archaeology, geographic information system, topography, remote sensing)

Moreover, the use of multi-spectral satellite images was experimented, together with the data provided by the archaeological surveys, to identify anthropological traces to be used in the reconstruction of the structure of the settlement in the surveyed landscape, with special reference to the area immediately to the west of Uthina.
The budget and the final results of the project were presented at the Valbonne-Frejus (France) conference, January 25th – 26th, 2002.
The IPAMED project has now been published in the volume: IPAMED Carte Informatisée du Patrimoine, Tunis, 2005, prepared by the Tunisian INP team.