La Trace de Rome? Aerial Photography and Archaeology in Mandate Syria and Lebanon

Abstract

In his 1933 book La Trace de Rome dans le désert de Syrie, Antoine Poidebard, the Jesuit missionary, French spy, colonial servant, air force officer, and archaeologist, published 219 aerial photographs of archaeological remnants in the Syrian steppe, which he identified as pertaining to the ancient Roman limes. This article examines Poidebard’s photographic reconfiguration of historical time and geographical space in the context of archaeology and historiography in Mandate Syria and Lebanon. The article argues that, in the absence of the archaeological groundwork that they were allegedly meant to enable, his photographs combined the appeal of a visible past with the promise of that past’s potential future as an object of investigation. In the transitory and politically precarious situation of the Mandate, the rare record constituted by these photographs upheld a projected connection between ancient Roman and modern French civilisation in the geographical region of the Mandate.