Tadmor-Palmyra: Reconstruction and Digitisation, with Zena Kamash

Abstract

In 2015, the world reacted furiously to the deliberate acts of destruction that the Islamic State group (Da’esh) staged in the Roman-period city of Tadmor-Palmyra in Syria. This provoked numerous plans for reconstruction, with each proposed project claiming to offer the best technological solution for rebuilding the archaeological site. In this podcast, Shivaike Shah discusses these events and their ramifications with Dr Zena Kamash, a British-Iraqi archaeologist and Senior Lecturer in Roman Archaeology at Royal Holloway University. They consider some of the key questions in the thorny debates over how we treat our cultural heritage. Should we rebuild sites of cultural heritage destroyed in conflict, and what is the role of digital reconstruction? Does the proliferation of reconstruction projects in Tadmor-Palmyra represent a form of digital colonialism? Crucially, what alternatives might we envision?

Bibliography

open-source

Zena Kamash, ‘The Palmyra Arch: Places, Memories and Ideologies’, Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference, Cardiff (2016)

Zena Kamash with Heba Abd el Gawad, Peter Banks, Antonia Bell, Felix Charteris, Sarah Ekdawi, Zoe Glen, Jayne Howe, Arthur Laidlaw, Muna Mitchell, Aditi Nafde, Andrew Parkin, Florence Wilson, Louise Thandiwe Wilson & Amy Wood, ‘Remembering the Roman in the Middle East and North Africa: Memories and Reflections from a Museum-Based Public Engagement Project’, Epoiesen: A Journal for Creative Engagement in History and Archaeology (2017) 

Zena Kamash, ‘Rebalancing Roman Archaeology: From Disciplinary Inertia to Decolonial and Inclusive Action’, Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal 4.1 (2021), 1-41

Nour Munawar, ‘Reconstructing Cultural Heritage in Conflict Zones: Should Palmyra be Rebuilt?’, EX NOVO Journal of Archaeology 2 (2017), 33-48

Sarah Bond, ‘The Ethics of 3-D Printing Syria’s Cultural Heritage’, Forbes (2016)

paywalled

Jen Baird & Zena Kamash, ‘Remembering Roman Syria: Valuing Tadmor-Palmyra from “Discovery” to Destruction’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 62.1 (2019), 1-29

Zena Kamash, ‘“Postcard to Palmyra”: Bringing the Public into Debates over Post-Conflict Reconstruction in the Middle East’, World Archaeology 49.5 (2017), 608-622

Monika Stobiecka, ‘Archaeological Heritage in the Age of Digital Colonialism’, Archaeological Dialogues 27 (2020), 113-125 

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.