PACHA project : CHAm Heritage in the Thừa Thiên – Huế and Quảng Trị Provinces,Vietnam, GIS and Digital Humanities

The PACHA project aims to create a reference system that centralises all known data regarding the ancient Champa present in two provinces of Central Vietnam, in Huế region (Thừa Thiên – Huế province) and Đông Hà region (Quang Tri province).

Cham kingdoms developed an remarkable, extremely original culture from the 5th to the 15th century, and their beliefs and customs have survived to the present day despite the territory was conquered by the Viêts in 1832, which erased any form of Cham state. . Now, there exists no exhaustive corpus of the Champa Heritage, whether texts (Cham and Sanskrit inscriptions, Viêt and Chinese Annals), or sculpture and architecture, or any mark visible in the landscape. Such a corpus will allow to capture a full, characteristic image of the Cham civilisation on this specific territory.

The purpose of the PACHA cooperation project is: to provide all existing –and forthcoming- data concerning the settlement process of the Cham population in this particular territory; to understand its evolution; to make any landscape alteration visible, which have moulded the process of settlement in central Vietnam; to include all ethnographic data that have been gathered on Cham cultural sites until today. It allows Vietnamese and French historians, archaeologists as well as geographers to work together to carry out an inventory of all existing Cham data, in the field, in the museums and in the archives, both in France and in Vietnam.

Studying the collected material will help to understand the settlement process as well as the territory organisation in a precise region (space) in the longue durée (time). The PACHA project aims to be an interdisciplinary study, based on the very large archaeological potential of a territory, on a field that has not been much exploited yet.