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Documenting the Dir Museum collection: Mission Accomplished

When the team returned from Pakistan last May, they brought back – carefully packed in suitcases – five external hard drives containing several copies of photos of sculptures they had set to document in the Dir Museum. After three weeks of hard (and fun!) work, the last batch of 500 objects was digitized, almost 70 sculptures were 3D scanned and all the quality control boxes were checked. The last digitization campaign was a success and we have now documented the whole collection! This win did not come easily. Indeed, in September 2022, we had to cancel our fieldtrip (you can read about it here), and we had to activate our contingency plan – a remote digitization campaign monitored from Bochum – in order to keep the DiGA Project going and guarantee the completion of the digitization of the collection.

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About a cancelled fieldtrip and a troubled land

As you all know by now, the very core of the DiGA project is the digitization of the Gandharan artefacts stored in the Dir Museum (Chakdara, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan). Documenting this collection requires us to travel to the area, therefore the project plan includes three fieldtrips. The first digitization campaign took place in November 2021, when almost half of the collection was documented (you can read about it in this blogpost). In the last few months, most of the team’s efforts went to the organisation of the second fieldtrip that was supposed to take place from September 25th to October 15th, 2022.  

However, starting in late August, distressing news about a resurgence of Taliban operations in the area started to spread, and in the last couple of weeks it was clear that the situation was turning too dangerous and unstable, therefore, our fieldtrip was cancelled.

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