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Starting in the 1920s and into the 1970s, the Danish archaeologist Harald Ingholt created a vast collection of sculpture, architecture, and epigraphy from Palmyra, Syria (first to third centuries AD). His paper archive contains 2,347 so-called archive sheets, which include photographs, transcriptions of inscriptions, stylistic observations and dating, provenance and collection information, and bibliography. In 2012 the archive was digitized by Professor Rubina Raja and the Palmyra Portrait Project. An in print, commented edition of the archive is underway, but this publication serves to make the archive sheets openly available as a research resource and a starting point for future research on Palmyrene art and epigraphy, the history of excavations in the Middle East, twentieth century collecting practices, and cultural heritage preservation in Syria.

Despite growing focus, archives remain under-utilised in archaeology and cultural heritage research. Regrettably, COVID-19 exacerbated archive inaccessibility, as researchers were largely cut off from physical resources, thereby underlining the need to develop best practice scenarios. Here we present a case study that demonstrates the potential of archives when made freely available.

Palmyra was the Greek and Latin name of the famous oasis city in the northern Syrian desert (Fig. 1). 1 The settlement is in fact more properly referred to by its Semitic name, Tadmor, as this latter toponym is attested throughout its history in the archaeological, epigraphic, and textual records. However, Palmyra is the site's well-known and established name, as well as the one most commonly used in present-day scholarship. The city was famed for its