The research team at Bamuni Parbat in Tezpur

Guwahati, March 23: Every slice of untold history engraved on the walls of ruins across the Northeast will be traced and documented by an archaeological team by this year-end.

This mega project, commissioned by the Archaeological Survey of India, will take into account every piece of relic that is more than 100 years old and worth a place in history.

A team from the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts — an autonomous body under the ministry of cultural affairs — has been entrusted with the responsibility of documentation through videos and photographs.

Titled Digital Documentation of Protected and Unprotected Archaeological and Heritage sites of Northeast India, the project is being co-ordinated by the Srimanta Sankaradeva Kalakshetra.

“It (the project) will bring to light many unknown and little-fact places in the region. And is also expected to throw new light on how we look at the region’s history,” Kalakshetra secretary Gautam Sarma said.

A documentation research team commissioned by the Sankaradeva Kalakshetra, including experts based in Delhi and Guwahati, are now combing the region for undocumented relics.

The final touches to the documentation will be given by the Centre’s Cultural Informatics Laboratory, which is a pioneering unit in digitally recreating heritage and presenting them through thematic multimedia — audio, video, photographs, text and graphics.

“We will have a reference library of anything historical in the Northeast. Anything that’s worth documenting, we are documenting,” he said.

The Northeast has around 200 archaeological sites listed either under the Archaeological Survey of India of the respective state archaeological departments. Assam alone has 93 of them.

The six-member research team has covered Tripura and Meghalaya so far and are currently working in Assam’s Sivasagar district. After Assam, they will move to Nagaland and Mizoram.

“We have documented 300 sites in three Assam districts alone,” said Subhra Devi, a research scholar from Jorhat, now based in Delhi.

The team includes two videographers, a photographer and two co-ordinators.

Experts say the team has come across such “hidden treasures, which are beautiful artistically and seem very important historically”.

“What they mean to the place’s history will be known only after these are studied and analysed,” the team member said.