The DiGA Project—Digitization of Gandhāran Artefacts: An Interview with Jessie Pons and Cristiano Moscatelli (Part 1)

In the field of Buddhist art, recent years have seen more and more digitization projects that center around the art and archaeology of Gandhāra.¹ Produced between the 1^st c. BCE and the 5^th c. CE, this art includes Buddhist sculptural production in schist and plaster that once adorned the monasteries constellating the landscape of north-western Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. Many objects that were taken from there at the beginning of the 20^th c. and are now in museum institutions around the world are digitally accessible via their online collections. A large portion of these objects, however, is still housed in museums, storage rooms and “godowns” that have never seen digitization efforts, leaving many gaps in the online Gandhāran corpus.²

The project Digitization of Gandhāran Art (DiGA) was created with the intention of filling in these gaps. Now that the project has come to an end, I sat down for a digital interview with Dr Jessie Pons, project co-director of DiGA and professor of South Asian History of Religions at Ruhr University Bochum, and Dr Cristiano Moscatelli, post-doc at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and research associate at DiGA. In this post, we chat about the set-up of the project, while in Part 2 we will discuss the practicalities of digitization and data storage.  

AC: How did this project come about?

JP: The whole story started with a chat between me and Frederik Elwert, DH coordinator at CERES [Center for Religious Studies] in Bochum. Frederik saw an interesting call for application from the BMBF [German Ministry for Education and Research] on eHeritage; the process seemed rather straightforward, so we decided to combine our expertise on Gandhāra and DH and try our luck. The first iteration of DiGA was actually “DiGA: Development of a digitization concept for Gandharan artefacts” within the eHeritage call under the funding line “Concepts” (funding period: February-October 2017). 

Our digitization target, the Dir Museum of Chakdara, was chosen in coordination with Dr Abdul Samad [Director of the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa/KPDOAM] and Dr Luca Maria Olivieri [Director of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan/MAIP]. Both their guidance was instrumental at this early stage. Antonio Amato [Ph.D., University of Rome “La Sapienza”] was hired as a post-doc and traveled to Pakistan to carry out a first survey of the Dir Museum, assess the number of objects, and understand the logistics. During this period, we were also contacted by Nicole Merkel-Hilf [Heidelberg University Library], who had heard about our endeavor and she offered heidICON as an option to host our repository. 

The second step was working within the Pelagios Working group “Linked Data Methodologies in Gandhāran Buddhist Art and Texts” (funded by Pelagios Network) [you can read all about it here and here]. This allowed us to further refine the digital concept,  outline in detail our metadata strategy, and define the milestones for the DiGA Thesaurus—which would integrate and expand existing vocabularies for the description and study of Gandhāran art.  

Eventually in 2019, the BMBF published the call for applications for the funding line “eHeritage: Digitization”. Our application was successful, and we were able to start the project in January 2021. We received an important number of applications (over 20!) and selected Cristiano and Serena [Autiero, Ph.D University of Rome “La Sapienza”] for the post-doctoral positions.

[These and other milestones are summarized in the DiGA Blog.]

AC: The final choice for digitization fell on the Dir Museum of Chakdara, as you’ve just mentioned. Can you tell me more about why this institution was chosen?

JP: The Dir Museum of Chakdara made sense for a 3-year project. First and foremost, the size of the collection is manageable—as opposed, for example, to the Peshawar Museum, which has a humongous number of objects that would also have required painstaking archival work. The Chakdara Museum is not just a good “compromise,” however, it is a truly valuable collection. The bulk comes from scientific excavations and the provenance of the objects is known, which is a rare fact in this field. The archaeological sites are also distributed in a region, the right bank of the Swat River, that has been understudied. 

AC: What were the main objectives of the project?

JP: The main objectives were to digitize the corpus of Buddhist sculptures at the Dir Museum of Chakdara and establish a digital repository of the collection. This endeavor itself had three main motivations—we called them the project’s “three pillars:” 

1- Preservation of this significant aspect of cultural heritage;

2- Accessibility—the sculptures are largely unpublished, and the collection is difficult to access;

3- Research.

Concrete scientific desiderata underpinned the DiGA project:

• Give visibility to the multiplicity of Gandhāran styles;
• Discern and map formal and iconographic variations in order to identify workshops and reconstruct the diachronic and synchronic ties between various productions;
• Reassess visual material in light of other types of sources such as literary data (with special attention, for example, to the rendering of the life of the Buddha or the depiction of bodhisattvas).

Something which we didn’t really foresee was the place that the DiGA Thesaurus would hold in our project. Initially, we conceived it as an internal tool, but it actually developed into a major output and evolved into a resource that can be used in other projects. Serena is the main actor behind the resource.

AC: This project is as much of a digitization project as it is fieldwork and archival work. How did you approach these different aspects?

JP: The work plan of the project was divided into the following “work packages” that were repeated three times:

1. Fieldtrip preparation
2. Digitization
3. Post Processing 
4. Description

The logistics were facilitated through our official collaboration with KPDOAM and MAIP. I prepared each fieldtrip in coordination with Abdul Samad and Luca Olivieri, who appointed a KPDOAM and MAIP representative for the DiGA project. We are deeply grateful to KPDOAM and the ISMEO/MAIP which provided in loco logistics and scientific guidance to our project, and to Heidelberg University Library which hosts the digital collection now available on heidICON. Their support was essential to the successful realization and execution of our project.

Once in situ, the objects were photographed and measured together with our colleagues at the Dir Museum. We also recorded archival data on the objects based on the registry of accession. Upon our return to Germany, the photos were post-processed and imported into heidICON. Serena and Cristiano described the objects according to pre-established guidelines. New concepts generated from the descriptions were discussed and fed into the DiGA thesaurus accordingly. We used GitHub as a platform for these descriptions. The photos’ metadata were then imported on heidICON.

AC: You did at least two campaigns to photograph the objects—how long were you there for each time?

CM: Yes, we did two field trips. The first was carried out in October-November 2021, and the second in April-May 2023, each lasting three weeks.

JP: The total of digitized objects is 1,532. This includes material from Chakdara and Saidu Sharif. These were documented during the two fieldtrips Cristiano just mentioned and one remote campaign which was carried out by our colleagues from KPDOAM following guidelines developed by Cristiano. 

AC: Tell me more about the remote campaign. What was the impact of that canceled trip and how did you redirect resources?

CM: We were able to set up the remote campaign thanks to the kind collaboration of KPDOAM and the Museum’s personnel. I prepared a small but comprehensive handbook with photographic tips (on camera settings and the like) to support them in documenting the objects according to the standards we aimed to achieve. After some test shots, they successfully managed to document a significant portion of the collection. We are beyond grateful for that. 

JP: A lot of flexibility was built into the project from the start. When Frederik and I prepared the application, we had to submit three different alternative work plans to respond to possible scenarios amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We simply activated one of the measures we had and redirected some of the funds allocated for one of the fieldtrips to the remote campaign. The BMBF has generally been very understanding and extremely flexible with the administrative contingencies of our project.

AC: When you were in the field, what was your usual day like?

CM: We stayed at the House of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Saidu Sharif, which is about a 40-minute to 1-hour drive from the Chakdara Museum (at least in the morning; in the afternoon, the streets are usually jammed with traffic!). We would leave the House quite early, around 7 am, to reach the museum. Once there, the museum staff would take the pieces from storage and clean them up to prepare them for photographing. Ginevra [Palmeri] (first fieldtrip; University of Naples “L’Orientale”) and Serena [Autiero] (second fieldtrip), along with Jessie, would take measurements and note special features (such as Kharoshthi marks and the like).³ Then, Aurangzaib Khan (photographer; first fieldtrip), Mehran Lughmani (KPDOAM, second fieldtrip), Saqlain Haider (KPDOAM, second fieldtrip) and I would photograph the objects. We would have breakfast around 10/10:30 am, with tea, coffee, and sweets. After enjoying local dishes for lunch in the museum’s garden, we would work until around 4/4:30 pm to ensure we could get back home before sunset.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we will be discussing in more detail the digitization process and the challenges of storing and preserving large amounts of data.

Notes

¹ Some years ago, the Library of Congress conserved and digitized an early Gandhāran manuscript. More recently some objects at the Ashmolean Museum have been 3D scanned (see Haynes, I., Peverett, I. and Rienjang, W., 2020. “De-fragmenting Gandhāran art: advancing analysis through digital imaging and visualization,” available here). A wide variety of scanning and imaging techniques have been used in Bamiyan. The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) has photographed, documented, and catalogued the pieces smashed by the Talibans in 2001 as part of the ISAC-National Museum of Afghanistan partnership. The Citizens Archive of Pakistan is now sponsoring a digitization project at the museums of Taxila and Lahore.

² There are, however, several print catalogs of Gandhāran museum collections both in Pakistan and in India. The references can be found here and here by consulting the relevant sections.

³ Kharoshthi is an Indic script that was used in Gandhāra. You can find more resources on Gandhari.org. Kharoshthi letters were often used as mason marks to signal the position of reliefs and sculptures in the décor of a Buddhist monastery.

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References

Baums, S. and Glass, A., n.d., Corpus of Gāndhārī Texts, in gandhari.org, https://gandhari.org/corpus, accessed 09/05/2024.

Cannady, S., 2019. “Rare 2,000-Year-Old Text of Early Buddhism Now Online” Library of Congress, accessed 09/05/2024.

Haynes, I., Peverett, I. and Rienjang, W., 2020. “De-fragmenting Gandhāran art: advancing analysis through digital imaging and visualization” in The Global Connections of Gandhāran Art, ed. by P. Stewart and W. Rienjang, Archaeopress, 251-264.

Jansen, M., Toubekis, G., Walther, A., Döring-Williams, M. and Mayer, I., 2008. “Laser scan measurement of the niche and virtual 3D representation of the small Buddha in Bamiyan” in Layers of Perception. Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA), ed. by A. Posluschny, Lambers K. A. and I. Herzog, 83-90.

Stein, G.J., 2019. “Cultural Heritage Preservation Work in Afghanistan and Central Asia.” Oriental Institute Annual Report, 2020, 21-31.