ArchXant: Archaeological and Epigraphic Research in Digital Humanities Era

Abstract

This paper is the result of a collective research1, a project mixing archaeology, epigraphy, and “digital humanities”2 dedicated to Xanthos one of the major Unesco sites of Asia Minor3. The city of Xanthos was rediscovered by the English explorer Charles Fellows in 1838. The first “official” excavations started in 1842 and resulted the same year in the shipment to London of numerous sculpted fragments, architectural blocks, and statues belonging to the major funerary monuments of the site, most of them from the Nereid Monument. More fragments were shipped in 1843 to the British Museum to be exhibited in the “Lycian room” of the Museum. At the end of the 19th century, between 1892 and 1894, the Austrian scholars Niemann and Benndorf carried out an epigraphic survey in Lycia and brought back to Vienna the squeezes of the inscriptions on stone they discovered and that were to be published in the Tituli Asiae Minoris. From 1950 (Xanthos) and 1962 (Létôon) on, French archaeologists explored the sites and published several monographs in the series Fouilles de Xanthos as well as hundreds of articles in different reviews. The collaboration with Quebec epigraphists started in 2000 and lasted until 2010 when the Turkish authorities decided to withdraw the excavation permission from France. We then had to decide how to deal with the large volume of more than 160 years of archives and research data, taking into account their dispersion (London, Liverpool, Vienna, Paris, Bordeaux, Quebec) and the variety of knowledge they contain. In 2016, we answered to a call of proposal (French ANR-FRSCQ Quebec) in the field of Digital Humanities and obtained a funding for the ArchXant project labeled “Archaeological and epigraphic research in the era of digital humanities: a Franco-Quebec project in archiving, exploiting, and disseminating knowledge”. ArchXant is at the heart of new problems which faces today the world of archaeologists and epigraphists: for the sake of future research how