A century of excavations, a century of scattered data
The Levant is one of the most intensively excavated regions in the world. Over more than a century, thousands of sites have been dug and documented. And yet, access to authoritative excavation summaries has remained imbalanced. Print encyclopedias have been published that aim to serve as a unified reference for some of these records, but they are expensive, seldom updated, and usually only available in a single language.
Professor Andrew Danielson at Harvard University and Professor Jacob Damm at the College of the Holy Cross recognized that the absence of a centralized, multilingual reference was slowing research and making it difficult for scholars to build a complete picture of the region's rich archaeological history.
Ambiguous records, three scripts, citable scholarship, and user-friendly workflows
Archaeological data is inherently messy. Site names change across languages and transliteration systems, excavation dates are disputed, attribution is complicated, records can be missing. Data models that assume clean structured input would fail, while ones too flexible to query wouldn’t be of much use.
The platform had to be multilingual, which added further complexity since entries needed to be authored, translated, and published independently per language, with right-to-left rendering for Arabic and Hebrew.
Every entry also needed to be citable, which meant generating PDFs with persistent DOIs for each version, so researchers could reference specific versions of a record even after they were updated.
Finally, the editorial team needed a practical, user-friendly workflow. The system had to surface the right controls in the right places without requiring technical intervention for routine publishing tasks.
A multilingual encyclopaedia built for scholars and the public alike
We designed and built a web platform that catalogues excavation sites across the Levant in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, with proper right-to-left layout for Arabic and Hebrew, and content authored and published independently per language.
Each entry can have multiple aliases, is linked to a hierarchical period taxonomy, and contains up to eleven categories of specialist report. Entries can be filtered based on these and displayed as a list or on a geospatial map of the region. Every published entry generates a PDF and editors can request a DOI with the click of a button, with the complex process of minting and versioning them automated away by code. Bibliographies are linked directly to Zotero and exportable in BibTex or RIS format.
"Jabbar Web Development has been an exceptional partner. As genuine collaborators, they brought a remarkable combination of high-level technical expertise, creativity, and the practical know-how to turn a complex idea into a functional and successful reality. More than just technicians and developers, Jabbar brought a creative vision, suggesting thoughtful and innovative improvements that made the final product much stronger than we had envisioned. Their balance of sophisticated back-end development with an intuitive and user-friendly front-end was particularly impressive. Jabbar’s incredible degree of professionalism and collegiality has truly made it a pleasure to work with them."
Andrew Danielson, Ph.D.Harvard University
"Working with Jabbar Web Development has been an extraordinarily positive experience. The work was less like consultation or contract labor and more like genuine collaboration as we transformed our project from an idea into a reality. In addition to professionalism and technical prowess, they offered creative solutions to both frontend and backend issues, working closely with us as we sought to anticipate the needs of prospective researchers utilizing our platform. But apart from the more straightforward deliverables of the project, the warmth and friendliness of the technicians made each interaction genuinely enjoyable."
Jacob C. Damm, Ph.D.College of the Holy Cross
Geospatial map view
A living, citable reference for Levantine archaeology
DEEL launched as the first unified, publicly accessible encyclopedia of its kind for the region, serving English, Arabic, and Hebrew content from a single platform. Each entry is independently citable via a persistent DOI that versions cleanly as the scholarly record is updated. The editorial team publishes and updates entries entirely through the admin interface, without developer involvement.
The handoff included detailed written documentation for every editorial workflow, technical design documents for future developers and IT staff who might take over the project, and a technical runbook covering deployment, backups, and infrastructure management.
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