The basic problems relating to rock temple sites in Asia are the very large number of sites that exist—many in places difficult to access—the inadequate knowledge of these sites, and resource inadequacies. As far as many countries in the Asian region are concerned, “resource inadequacies” involve at least seven major factors:
1. Survey and research; i. e., inadequate overall survey, documentation, registration, and mapping of sites; and an even greater inadequacy of research
2. Policy prioritization, including recognition of the importance of even “unimportant” sites
3. Appropriate institutional formation and development
4. Human resources: scientific leadership and technical, research, and managerial personnel
5. Infrastructure
6. Funding, especially sustainable and continuing funding, particularly with regard to tenured or self-sustaining employment possibilities and regular material supplies
7. Continued training and retraining of personnel and upgrading of investigative and conservation technology and equipment
In formulating the management policy and structure of the Dambulla Cultural Triangle Project, which began in 1982 and was scheduled for completion in 1996, every attempt has been made to address these general issues as much as to the specific problems of site management, research, and conservation.
The Cultural Triangle Project
The Cultural Triangle Project in Sri Lanka is a joint Unesco-Sri Lankan program, involving the investigation, conservation, presentation, and management of five of Sri Lanka's seven World Heritage Sites. The following discussion highlights some of the program's main features in terms of the general issues listed.
The most distinctive feature of the Cultural Triangle Project is that it involves, in the Sri Lankan context, an entirely new type of institutional arrangement, which brings together government administrators and technical experts, university specialists, and private architectural consultants working in association with the temple authorities.
Thus, three or four groups cooperate, while each retains its own authority. This makes for a complex and polycentric institutional structure, whose advantages are (1) the release of a large number of creative energies in the formulation of policy and the implementation of various aspects of the project, and (2) the safeguards provided by a multiplicity of viewpoints in an area of activity where there can be irreversible consequences.
An annual review by a joint Unesco-Sri Lankan Working Group monitors the progress and development of the project. By this mechanism and the participation of international specialists from time to time, the project is able to measure internal standards against international norms where national expertise or resources are inadequate.
Equally important aspects are university-based and internationally collaborative research and training programs, which use the project and the surrounding area as a laboratory and a field school for developing studies of the total archaeological landscape and for the conservation of murals.
Contemporary Dambulla is an urban center with modern services and communications that give the project a good infrastructural base. A major shortcoming is an adequately equipped conservation laboratory, but this is part of a wider situation that is being currently addressed at a national level.
World History
