NHDP Granted Six-Year Extension
NHDP has received a grant to continue its work for six more years. The new grant will allow us to continue the work in the Kathmandu valley, and expand it to western Nepal and other places that are culturally and historically related to the Kathmandu valley. NHDP is the first project to comprehensively photograph, describe, survey, analyse these monuments, and make the records available in an open database. The project aims to document and inventory more than 2,000 monuments (temples, monasteries, palaces, and other historic buildings), 2,500 inscriptions, and 8,000 objects, as well as the unique intangible cultural heritage associated with the monuments: rituals, festivals, and other social and religious events and practices. The project will also focus on the monuments endangered by earthquakes and urban change that have not yet been thoroughly documented. This initiative has already played an important role, for example, in the reconstruction of monuments after the devastating earthquakes of 2015. The data resulting from the documentation will be available on the Digital Archive of Nepalese Arts and Architecture (DANAM) and Heidelberg University Library’s image database, HeidICON.
The NHDP will collaborate again with the Saraf Foundation for Himalayan Traditions and Culture, the Department of Archaeology of the Nepalese government, the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust and UNESCO Nepal and other partners. The project will continue to work with Heidelberg University Library, the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) and the Institute for Spatial Information and Measurement Technology at Mainz University of Applied Sciences.