Since 2020, the project Archive Archaeology: Preserving and Sharing Palmyra’s Cultural Heritage through Harald Ingholt’s Digital Archives (funded by the ALIPH foundation), led by Centre Director and Professor Rubina Raja, has been researching the 2,347 archive sheets of the Ingholt Archive. The Danish archaeologist Harald Ingholt (1896-1985) was a prominent figure in ancient Near Eastern archaeology throughout much of the twentieth century (Raja and Sørensen 2015), allowing him to collect hundreds of images of Palmyrene funerary sculpture for his research. His archive, once a private research resource, is an as of yet untapped resource on Palmyra’s history and archaeology during its Roman period, ca. 50 BC – AD 273. Its physical, paper form is housed in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, thereby limiting access to the archive. The Ingholt Archive was digitized within the framework of the Palmyra Portrait Project in 2012, when the sheets were scanned at 1200 dpi and saved as .tif files. The archive is now available in high-resolution .pdf form. 

The new publication of the Ingholt Archive as open data is available through the Journal of Open Archaeology Data (Bobou, Miranda and Raja 2021). The archive sheets are saved as twenty-one sets of .pdf files in the repository Figshare (DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5509725) and organized into four categories: (1) Numbered PS sheets; (2) Sheets with no PS number; (3) Archive Additions; and (4) Sheets from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. These files are raw, primary data, collected by Ingholt over a span of approximately fifty years beginning in the 1920s, now freely available. In addition to providing the raw data, the publication also gives context for the data set, describes the methods used in its compilation and interpretation, and highlights its reuse potential.

This publication not only strives to democratize data by widening accessibility to primary sources, but also sets the example of a best practice in archaeology: Open data is not often shared in humanities research as it is in the sciences, but the Ingholt Archive is now a source for scholarship on Palmyrene funerary sculpture to be checked against. Publication of the Ingholt Archive as open data allows anyone with Internet to access primary data that has already proved to be foundational for much research of Palmyrene history and archaeology. Now this data set will give scholars, cultural heritage experts, and the public the opportunity to produce new scholarship, contribute to Syrian heritage restitution efforts, and disseminate knowledge of Palmyra’s art, architecture, archaeology, and epigraphy. As open data, the Ingholt Archive is now poised to generate much new and exciting scholarship, but also advocacy work for Syrian heritage that has been lost due to looting and destruction.

This open data publication of the archive sheets anticipates the forthcoming in print and e-book editions of the archive as The Ingholt Archive: The Palmyrene Material available in 2022 through the Brepols Publishers series Archive Archaeology (Bobou, Miranda, Raja and Yon forthcoming). These editions will include a transcription of the archive sheets, commentary, and bibliography. The Ingholt Archive, in all its published forms, is the latest in a series of recent publications that share primary source data on Palmyra including Ingholt’s seminal 1928 work, Studies on Palmyrene Sculpture (Bobou et al. 2021), and his excavation diaries, Excavating Palmyra (Raja, Steding and Yon 2021).

For more about the Archive Archaeology project, see https://projects.au.dk/archivearcheology/

For the Palmyra Portrait Project, see https://projects.au.dk/palmyraportrait/

Bibliography

• Bobou, O., A. C. Miranda and R. Raja. 2021. “The Ingholt Archive. Data from the project, ‘Archive Archaeology: Preserving and Sharing Palmyra’s Cultural Heritage through Harald Ingholt’s Digital Archives’”. Journal of Open Archaeology Data 9:6, 1-10. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/joad.78
• Bobou, O., A. Miranda, R. Raja and J.-B. Yon. Forthcoming. The Ingholt Archive: The Palmyrene Material, Archive Archaeology. Turnhout: Brepols.
• Bobou, O., J. V. Jensen, N. B. Kristensen, R. Raja, and R. R. Thomsen, eds. 2021. Studies on Palmyrene Sculpture: A Translation of Harald Ingholt’s Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur, Edited and with Commentary, Studies in Palmyrene Archaeology and History 1, Turnhout: Brepols.
• Raja, R. and A. H. Sørensen. 2015. Harald Ingholt & Palmyra. Aarhus: Antikmuseet Aarhus Universitet. (Danish)
• Raja, R. and A. H. Sørensen. 2015. Harald Ingholt & Palmyra. Aarhus: Antikmuseet Aarhus Universitet. (English)
• Raja, R., J. Steding and J.-B. Yon, eds. 2021. Excavating Palmyra. Harald Ingholt’s Excavation Diaries: A Transcript, Translation, and Commentary, Studies in Palmyrene Archaeology and History 4, 2 vols. Turnhout: Brepols.