Three hundred years of Palmyrene history. Unlocking archaeological data for studying past societal transformations.

Rubina Raja,Raven Garvey,Iza Romanowska,Olympia Bobou

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0256081

Abstract

While archaeological sciences have made great advances over the last decades through combining archaeological evidence and natural sciences in order to push borders for the understanding of archaeological contexts, traditional archaeology still holds an immense latent potential. Such potential can be realized through baseline projects that pull together unexplored bodies of material culture and study these in detail in order to investigate their significance for the understanding of the human past. This paper presents such a large-scale baseline study and focuses on the presentation of the results emerging from the recently compiled corpus of more than 3700 funerary portraits stemming from one location in the ancient world, Roman Palmyra, an oasis city in the Syrian Desert. The analysis of the chronological development of the numerous portraits allows us to follow the fluctuations in the production of these portraits over approximately 300 years. Here we discuss and review the developments in connection with historical sources and discuss until now unknown events, which have emerged through the data analysis. The paper brings to the forefront the significance of social science baseline projects, which often do not receive enough attention or funding, but which in fact are fundamental for furthering our understanding of the human past and push borders for the directions in which we can take such studies in the future.

Highlights

The study of past societies is inherently based on incomplete data, often leading to criticism of such studies being subjective and widely open to interpretation
While it is well known that Palmyra’s urban area expanded in the course of the first and second centuries CE, following a trend that is broadly detectable in the Roman Near East, and that its society flourished in these periods as well, it is possible for the first time to follow the city’s societal transformation through the funerary portraits and the mapping of the development and capacities of the monumental graves
Palmyra is a well-known Roman-period middle-sized urban city displaying a bulk of archaeological material, including the recently compiled, locally produced funerary portraits set up as commemoration memorials for local elite members in monumental graves

Summary

Introduction

The study of past societies is inherently based on incomplete data, often leading to criticism of such studies being subjective and widely open to interpretation. In particular archaeologists and ancient historians study societies to which they have no direct access through living individuals. While we will never be able to reconstruct how past societies worked in all details, we must strive to achieve as high an accuracy as possible through the evidence which we have at hand.

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion