Abstract

Studying Historic Migrations with a Collaborative GIS
Track: Archaeology
Authors: Marc Guidry

The Lebu ethnic group in West Africa migrated in waves from the second-century to the eighteenth-century, from present day Mauritania to the Cap Vert peninsula of present day Dakar. The locations of the Lebu village sites had previously been identified, but there was little information on the time periods that these sites were inhabited. A Collaborative GIS (in the form of a web application built using ArcServer 10 and the ArcGIS API for Flex) provided a solution to this problem. It enabled historians, scholars, and other domain experts to contribute their knowledge to provide a comprehensive, interactive visual of the migration of this ethnic group. The analysis of the Lebu migration is a use case of this web application that can be applied to other historical events.