“The Ingholt Archive. Data from the Project ‘Archive Archaeology: Preserving and Sharing Palmyra’s Cultural Heritage through Harald Ingholt’s Digital Archives’”

Abstract

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.

Archive Archaeology: Preserving and Sharing Palmyra's Cultural Heritage through Harald Ingholt's Digital Archives. A case study in the accessibility and potential of archives

“…The print and electronic publications contain transcriptions of each archive sheet and accompanying commentary (Bobou et al in press). Also freely available online as open data, the archive appears in pdf format (Bobou et al 2021). Such publications will mitigate some issues in accessing archives that were particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic, when scholars were limited in their access to physical resources.…”

Preserving Endangered Cultural Heritage Through 3D Scanning. The Case of the Banqueting Tokens from Palmyra, Syria

“…In order to continue meaningful research on Palmyra, other (re)sources thus need to be utilized and new paths sought to study this important site. Through the decade-long Palmyra Portrait Project [5] and the Archive Archaeology Project [6] archival materials stemming from the Danish archaeologist Harald Ingholt have been made openly available [7,8]. With the scanned tesserae presented in this contribution, we now contribute an entirely new, and different, openly available dataset linked to the oasis city.…”