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Leo Boer Collection NPAPH
Cite as:
2015-01-19 Non-Professional Archeaological Photographs-Project (NPAPH) 10.17026/dans-2b3-6wvq
This photo archive contains the photo collection of the late Leo Boer (1926-2009). As a student for the priesthood in Rome in the mid-1950s, he had the opportunity to stay in Jerusalem for one year (1953-1954), at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem. There he engaged himself in Biblical studies, joined the third excavation led by Father Roland de Vaux at Khirbet Qumran – near the caves in which the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were found – and participated in many archaeological excursions organised by the École Biblique.
After Boer died, twenty-one photo film canisters were discovered in a box in his garage. In total the photo films turned out to contain about seven hundred photographs taken by Boer of places in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Egypt in 1953 and 1954. Although the photographs had not been developed, Boer had made a careful list of them during his stay in Jerusalem, adding numbers to the pictures, captions and the dates on which they were taken. Boer also kept a diary and travel account, which consists of about a hundred and forty pages, including a preface and index.
The combination of his pictures and text provides us with an excellent spirit of the times, the years just after the Second World War and the foundation of the State of Israel. Moreover, it gives an account of the beginnings of a new phase in Palestinian archaeology.
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