ABSTRACT
The Antioch Recovery Project (ARP) uses digital tools to reunite the vast corpus of mosaic fragments from the ancient city of Antioch, located near the mouth of the Orontes River in modern Antakya, Türkiye (bordering Syria). Since their excavation, hundreds of fragments of these mosaics have been dispersed across the globe in what Ezgi Erol names a “mosaic diaspora,” rendering these fragments in Arjun Appadurai's words “accidental refugees.” ARP partners with an ongoing, research-driven class taught at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, MD. Using a flipped-classroom model, this class analyses the mosaic fragments within three different chronological periods: (1) the 2nd–6th-centuries CE, when artists crafted them; (2) the years between 1932 and 1939, when they were excavated by an international team; and (3) their twentieth and twenty-first-century contemporary museum afterlives. Digital, open-access explorations, and research results appear on the project's blog and through ArcGIS and StoryMaps, connecting the project with the public and with the global community of Antioch researchers. In the following chapter, we introduce the overall project, its connected pedagogical approach, and two public-facing results: an ArcGIS map of known locations of Antioch mosaic fragments, and a digital reconstruction of the fragmented Hall of Philia mosaic, the latter made using the iPad application Procreate. Both explorations contribute to ARP's goals of visualising relationships across the dispersed mosaic corpus in a public, free, and accessible format. This work mends breaks between fragments distributed across a variety of institutions to illuminate the ancient and modern geopolitical and social conditions in which these mosaics were and are embedded, conditions that their materials, making, and motifs have also helped to shape.
