Project

The Heritage Gazetteer began with work done by Dr Hafed Walda, as part of a team at King's College London preparing the online edition of the Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (published in 2009). Our idea was simply to provide geographic information for that project; we then began to add material for the preparation of a similar publication, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, of the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica (published by BILNAS in 2020). In 2013-2015, thanks to a grant from the Leventis Foundation, members of the team worked to create a Heritage Gazetteer for Cyprus, which is now online. We were then enabled by a grant from Global Business Services to take the framework developed for Cyprus, and use it to present the rich data which we had gathered for Libya; the resultant Gazetteer was published in 2016. To this framework we have been adding heritage data gathered by other members of the British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies, and enriching the information about locations: in 2020-2021 substantial contributions were made by students at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, managed by the Kathleen Kenyon Fellow in Libyan Cultural Heritage, Dr Valeria Vitale.

The Archives of the Institute, held by the University of Leicester, were catalogued by the Library there, with a grant from the Institute. The information was added to the University Library Archives catalogue in 2018; and those data also form the basis of the Online Archives, which were made available online in 2019. Work is now starting on enhancing the Online Archives with further information, and with digital materials.

The team at King's was led by Professor Charlotte Roueché (Centre for Hellenic Studies:  ORCID 0000-0002-3606-2049), working with Dr Walda, Dr Gabriel Bodard, Dr Stuart Dunn (Department of Digital Humanities), Neil Jakeman (King's Digital Laboratory); the site was designed by Ginestra Ferraro (King's Digital Laboratory).