Palmyra flourished in the first three centuries CE thanks to the wealth that the city's elite accumulated through their successful exploitation of the trade routes between the Roman Empire and the East and through which they came to hold a pivotal role in the networks of these centuries. During those years, it was transformed from a small settlement to a city that had all the external markers of Roman civic culture, demonstrated at an institutional level by the presence of a people's assembly and a body of selected officials (demos and boule) as well as the participation of its elite in the senatorial class, architecturally by the building of spaces such as the agora, the council house, the theatre, baths, basilicas and colonnaded streets, and socially by the setting up of honourific statues in gratitude for benefactions and other services rendered to the city.

While it is possible to discuss the history of Palmyra in this period broadly, the lack of textual evidence from the city itself, the biased, and sometimes biased, literary and historical testimonies of the Romans, and the uneven archaeological exploration of the site, with earlier scholars focusing on the Roman-period ruins almost exclusively, means that our knowledge of Palmyra still has substantial gaps.

In the last ten years, the material collected by the Palmyra Portrait Project and its spin off projects and the subsequent publications have resulted in clarifications of some issues of social structure and chronology. For one deep investigations and contextualisation of legacy data from past excavations can reveal how remains of buildings can be understood as sites of lived experiences and changes through time. This paper will give an introduction to the projects and set out future lines of enquiry and suggestions for best practice scenarios.