Stakeholders of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline project have come up with a compilation of cultural artefacts of the two countries discovered in course of the project and which are expected to serve as a reminder for future generations of their culture as well as spur developers to integrate rescue archaeology in infrastructure development. The archaeological discoveries, the methods used and the importance of preserving such cultural artefacts for posterity are at the centre of discussions at a three-day (May 24 – 26) international conference on rescue archaeology along the Chad-Cameroon pipeline underway at the Yaounde Hilton Hotel.

Organised by the Pipeline Steering and Monitoring Committee (CPSP) in partnership with Cameroon Oil Transportation Company (COTCO), the Yaounde confab brings together archaeologists from within and without Cameroon and Chad. In separate speeches during the opening ceremony yesterday May 24, the General Manager of COTCO, Jacky Lesage, the representative of the Executive General Manager and President of CPSP as well as the Minister of Culture, Ama Tutu Muna, all hailed the initiative to document archaeological discoveries. To the Minister, the archaeological vestiges represent the notion of modernity, circulation and prosperity on one hand and the image of the remote past on the other. “Preventive archaeology enables us to rescue an important part of these vestiges and any information gathered from these excavations always enriches the knowledge of the past”, Mrs Ama Tutu Muna noted.

Like the Minister, Mr Jacky Lesage said one of the major concerns during the construction of the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline was to protect and preserve the cultural sites located along the 1,070 km of the survey corridor through the forests and savannah. “After what appears nowadays as the most extensive archaeological survey ever conducted in Central Africa, researchers from Cameroon, Chad and other countries have largely documented the sites and discoveries until then unknown”, he stressed. A view corroborated by Augustine Broh Ndum, Permanent Secretary of CPSP who sat in for the Executive General Manager and President of CPSP, Adolphe Moudiki. “In the archaeological field, an experience has been acquired in the administrative monitoring and technical control of the cultural heritage aspects of large-scale projects”, he said.

A guided visit of the displayed discoveries rounded off the protocol part of the ceremony yesterday. Besides paper presentations on archaeology, the conference participants will also be presented a book, titled, “Kome-Kribi: Rescue Archaeology along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, 1999 – 2004” in which elements of the archaeological discoveries have been recorded. The confab ends tomorrow, Thursday May 26.