Historical Cultural Landscape: Mapping of Traditional House in Aceh

Abstract

Cultural landscape mapping layers historical, spatial, and narrative as an inventory of heritage – maintaining resilient data – knowledge. The traditional house is one of the elements of the historical cultural landscape exploring people’s engagement with the places that they inhabit. Places are literally “mapped” in order to mark essential composed cultural representations of the area. The widespread heritage of traditional houses called Rumoh Aceh is increasingly disappearing along with the development of modern housing demanded by the community. Therefore, this study aims to assemble a repository of the existence of traditional houses in Aceh Besar and classify the use of different building materials, and changes made to the original building materials among them. A range of datasets are collected including the coordinates of the location of Rumoh Aceh and the images of its current condition. The first finding is a map of Rumoh Aceh established in unexplored villages that illustrates the density of traditional Rumoh Aceh spreading among the villages located in Aceh Besar Regency. Secondly, most of the thatched roof – the original roof materials of Rumoh Aceh – is replaced by zinc and repainted with non-wood colours like blue, yellow, and green. In addition, all the results are available online. Thus, it enables people to access the historical Rumoh Aceh landscape embedded in digital data that is resilient and sustainable. The availability of online data is not only for cultural conservation but also for disaster mitigation and post-disaster reconstruction.