Challenges, Strategies and High-Tech Applications for Saving the Cultural Heritage of Syria, pp. 43-56, 2022/03/24
Proceedings of the Workshop held at the 10th ICAANE in Vienna, April 2016
During the years 1978 to 1980 Marcell Restle and Johannes Koder undertook surveys of late antique andEarly Byzantine monuments in southern Syria, in the ancient landscape of Auranitis (Hauran) They investigated theextended remains of prestigious buildings, churches, monasteries and farmsteads, which at that time were partially stillin good condition. The project was carried out with financial support by the Austrian Science Fund and in cooperationwith researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Vienna University of Technology The monuments andinscriptions from Azra‘a and Šaqrā were published in part 1 (2012). In 2016, just before his sudden death, MarcellRestle submitted the final part 2, the documentation of the monuments in Shaqqa. The edition then had to be finishedby Annegret Plontke-Lüning. Part 2 contains especially in-depth analytical comparisons of the basilica in Shaqqa withthe pillar basilicas in Tafhā, Bosra, Hīt and Nimra and the column basilicas in Šaqrā, Umm idj-Ğimāl, Umm iz-Surab,Mutā’iya and Suwaidā. The fact that some of the monuments published in parts 1 and 2 were severely damaged duringthe last 30 years, gives to this documentation an additional exceptional importance In this paper, a short overviewover the geodetic and analogue-photogrammetric documentation work and the types of architectural targets that weredocumented is given.
Keywords: Syria; Hauran; early Christian and Byzantine monuments; documentation; photogrammetry
