AU studies are of global class: Prof

ALLAHABAD UNIVERSITY was the first university of the country which had taken an initiative to apply science and technology to archeology to compete with global standards of archeological investigations and studies, said Dr GK Rai here on Friday.

ALLAHABAD UNIVERSITY was the first university of the country which had taken an initiative to apply science and technology to archeology to compete with global standards of archeological investigations and studies, said Dr GK Rai here on Friday.

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Talking to Hindustan Times, Dr Rai, who is a senior professor in the Archeological Department of Allahabad University and coordinator of Centre of Advanced Studies in Archeology, said that there was need to give a scientific colour to architecture in this country as now it was just a part of history which needed no scientific explanations of the events.

But in other countries, archeology was a part of anthropology which was based on scientific explanations and scientific process of ascertaining facts lost in time.

This was the reason why archeological investigations of foreign archeologists were regarded as more reliable, he added.

He said he had been striving hard since 1980 to assist archeological studies through purely scientific and technological methods. But in 2003, Allahabad University and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-K) teamed up to apply scientific and technological methods to archeological studies and entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to achieve multiple objectives.

Dr Rai said that firstly, it was intended to use advance technology for the study of the past, secondly to understand the past as well as the preservation of artifacts and sites of architectural importance and finally to dissipate the knowledge of Indian cultural heritage in the world.

He said with the help of scientists, they had succeeded in applying 3-dimensional digital examination of artifacts in the university museum and now these could be recreated with the applied technology.

Efforts were on to use Geo Information System (GIS) and Ground Probing Radar (GPR) in studying landscape for archeological studies as the old system of survey was inadequate to provide latest information about ancient architecture.

He said that maintaining records in files was not a safe mode of preserving records as these could not be retrieved immediately when required.

The studies conducted by Ground Probing Radar system and the information stored in computers could
be accessed easily any time.