Anchise

Methods, knowledge and toolkit to enhance the protection of cultural heritage against looting and illicit trafficking. Understand, Prevent, Act, Repair.

Objective

Anchise aims to build a global and comprehensive answer to meet the challenges of effective protection of cultural heritage in Europe, for both antiquities and modern cultural goods, in order to provide sustainable and replicable solutions. Its assumption is that addressing this topic implies a bottom-up process, which will build a global and comprehensive approach at every stage of the analysis.

Crossing the methodology of networking that has proved its efficiency in the H2020 NETCHER project with the innovative results of new technologies developments (H2020 PREVISION, H2020 MAGNETO), Anchise will create an operational set of tools applicable for European contexts and replicable in other situations abroad.

Anchise will set the stage with appropriate tools to allow a satisfactory integration of cultural heritage protection in the European framework for the next decades.

Impact

When creating this enabling environment, the project will focus on four specific objectives (which correspond to four activities):

1. Evaluate technologies on – or close to – the market with user-centric methods in order to help bridge the gap between technologies and the market (looting detection, detection of neglected or abandoned heritage, object identification and traceability, object marking)
2. Implement Pilot Experimentation Areas to understand local, sociological and economic contexts, mobilize local stakeholders, train beta-users, specify and implement technology demonstrations, evaluate the impact of replicability of demonstrations
3. Develop images, SFS and 3D recognition to improve the documentation and recording of objects, then control of objects provenance and detection of illicit trafficking.
4. Disseminate the outcomes of the project, engage and increase the capacities of communities to help bridging the gap between innovations and LEAs, museums, archaeologists, art dealers, auctions houses, citizens.

Through the integration of new tools developed during the project, Anchise will bridge the gap between new technologies and end-users involved in CH protection, with effective use in operations, and will rely on a network of users and experts.

The originality of the approach proposed by Anchise relies on the ambition to be recognized as the reference platform for practitioners concerning the assessment of worldwide technologies and the early adoption of solutions that bring high added value and positive cost-benefit analysis, thanks to their integration into civil society for the service of heritage protection.