Workshop starts in Bagan, Myanmar
A ten-day ICCROM workshop on “Rapid assessment methods for mural paintings in Bagan, Myanmar” (21 June - 01 July 2016) has recently started. The workshop began with a brief review of the achievements and progress made since the previous ICCROM workshop undertaken in Bagan in June 2014.
The sheer scale of the site of Bagan, which is renowned for its extraordinary wealth of heritage, presents a number of key conservation challenges. With more than 2 500 temples and monuments containing exquisite but highly vulnerable wall paintings and decorative stucco, a simple and fast method is needed to establish the site’s conservation priorities through rapid and efficient assessment of the level of damage and vulnerability of the temples and their mural paintings.
The current ICCROM workshop aims to develop a system to document the priorities visually, together with the local team. This system will collect the local team’s knowledge and support the development of a plan of action for future conservation initiatives in Bagan, communicating these concrete needs to the Myanmar Government and other relevant institutions.
The workshop is led by ICCROM consultant Monica Martelli Castaldi, who reports:
“The participants are enthusiastic and resourceful in exploring better ways to efficiently map and protect their heritage. The knowledge each carries regarding the site is unique, and essential to the overall understanding of Bagan and its conservation challenges.”
This workshop is undertaken in collaboration with the Department of Archaeology, Myanmar, and generously supported by the Korean Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA).