The Algarve's Virtual Archaeological Museum (MAVA) will even advance, according to the Algarve Museum Network, for whom this project is «an old ambition». The first steps were taken over the past two months and culminated in a partnership established between the network and the National Archeology Museum.
According to the Algarve Museum Network (RMA), «the works, centered on the identified sites and on the materials recovered by Sebastião Phillipes Estácio da Veiga as part of his archaeological map for the Algarve region, which resulted in the opening of the ephemeral Algarve Archaeological Museum and in the production of the voluminous work Antiguidades Monumentaes do Algarve, have already begun».
This news, stresses the RMA, «I would exult Estácio da Veiga, had the Algarve Museum not been one of the nineteenth-century archaeologist's battle horses».
In a note sent to the editorial staff, the network of Algarve museums recalls that “since the mid-XNUMXth century, Portuguese and foreign researchers have been collecting remains from archaeological sites in the region. These sets, in some cases numerous, are part of the collections of museums from outside the region, especially the National Museum of Archaeology».
The segmentation of sets into smaller collections «with a view to incorporating the geography of provenance into museums is an unlikely prospect, given the importance they assume as representative collections of pioneering archaeological exploration campaigns in Portugal. However, many of these cultural assets are representative of human occupation in the Algarve in different chronologies and are not museums, studied or even inventoried”, adds the RMA.
The Virtual Archaeological Museum of the Algarve, which will be hosted on the Internet, is part of the maxim “Virtualized Past in Future” and “will have the mission of disclosing the “characteristics” of the Algarve's past and identity that are deposited in these museums, systematizing the whole associated information, embodied in the construction of explanatory discourses about the evolution of the peoples who inhabited the extreme south of the country, their models of social organization and economic activities practiced».
The use of the information provided by the Virtual Museum, explains the Algarve Museums Network, «will take place on three levels: scientific, insofar as the implementation of the project represents an increase in existing knowledge for the characterization of the evolution of the occupation. human in the region; sociocultural, promoting the approximation of local populations to their culture and past; the Virtual Museum is a vehicle of attraction for distinguished visitors to the Algarve region. The Museum will function, therefore, as a digital platform that invites people to circulate and discover the territory of the Algarve and its museums, sites and monuments».
This portal will also serve as a repository for the cartography and inventory of archaeological sites in the 16 Algarve municipalities, «constituting a tool for research projects and cultural dynamism that focus on the regional archaeological heritage».
The project is structured in phases. The first, which now follows, is the survey and inventory of the collections assembled by Estácio da Veiga, which are in the custody of the National Archeology Museum, both those that he deposited and those that José Leite de Vasconcelos, creator and first director of the institution, acquired later.
This work will be carried out in partnership by technicians from the Algarve's municipalities and the Regional Directorate of Culture of the Algarve, who are part of the RMA Archeology group, and will support an application for community funds when programs to safeguard and enhance cultural heritage are opened.
Click here to enlarge the archaeological map of the Algarve
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