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

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.