A joint international conference between the Lost Cities Rediscovered: Reexamining Excavation Histories in Late Ottoman and Mandate Western Asia’ (LoCi) project, and the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, took place between 2 and 3 October 2026 at The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Copenhagen. The conference reflects the growing need for utilizing legacy data as primary evidence that can lead to new knowledge about urban centres and lost cities.

The conference Excavating cities and archiving knowledge. Revisiting the rediscovery of “Lost Cities” in the Late Ottoman and early Mandate periods, was organized by Olympia Bobou (Aarhus University), Miriam Kühn (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), and Rubina Raja (Aarhus University). It brought together a group of scholars whose work on archives is at the forefront of re-evaluating archives, by studying them as primary sources that are just as important as the excavations in which they were created. The event revealed several common strands of inquiry in their presentations. The relationship between the locals and the foreign travelers and archaeologists was one that was examined in several of the papers. Together, they revealed how these interpersonal encounters were characterized by various degrees of formality between them, but always with an understanding that the foreign archaeologists were somehow superior.

The role of photographers in documenting excavations, but also life at the site and the villages around it, was another such strand. It revealed how ‘amateur’ photographers could be more professional than archaeologist photographers, but also how archaeologists were shaped by contemporary ideas about ethnography when taking photographs.

A third strand concerned the content of the photographs, and what they revealed not about the people who took them or were photographed, but the ruins themselves. This focused on the role of institutions and political forces exerting their power on the construction of the narratives surrounding the lost cities and their ruins.

The conference was bookended by two more general papers: one on the perception of ruins in Islamic literature and historical documents by Alain Schnapp, and one on the way that archaeology also creates lost cities through its use – and misuse – of archives by Jen A. Baird.

The proceedings of the conference will be published in the Archive Archaeology series by Brepols.

Read more in the Book of abstracts.