Finders – Keepers: Legacy data as source to understanding knowledge and power constructions in large-scale urban excavations

The Lost Cities Rediscovered Project, which reexamines excavation histories in Late Ottoman and Mandate West Asia, pivots on five case study sites in the region: Baalbek, Palmyra, Gerasa, Raqqa and Samarra. Through trawling the archival materials the LOCI project has since 2025 been analysing the reasons for and strategies to conduct large-scale urban excavations at those sites. This presentation gives an introduction to the project and moves on to focus on one project case study through the archival material relating to the urban excavations at Gerasa, Antioch on the Gold River, modern Jerash in northern Jordan. The presentation gives insights into the long and complicated excavation history of the site from its “pinning” on the map by Jasper Ulrich Seetzen, over the numerous travellers who visited the site between 1806 and the beginning of the excavations there, first by the various German teams and later by an American-British team until the outbreak of the Second World War.

Lecture: 16-17 / Reception 17-18