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By Simona Stoyanova

Working with epigraphic material has always been an interdisciplinary endeavour – involving knowledge of language(s), history, archaeology, palaeography, and increasingly, in the last decade or so, a certain amount of awareness of developments in digital humanities. This is why, after a classical philology degree at Sofia University, I decided to combine further epigraphic practice with dedicated digital humanities training at King’s College London. I have worked on a number of digital epigraphy projects both in London and Leipzig, the main goal of which has been the publication of existing and new corpora of inscriptions, providing users with different pathways through the material, rich indexing and multifaceted browsing based on text encoding in EpiDoc XML. Part of this work has involved training and dissemination of the EpiDoc standard, publishing practices and project management strategies.

Simona teaching EpiDoc in Palermo

I am very happy to be joining the LatinNow team as a specialist in digital epigraphy. My main responsibility will be managing the epigraphic database assembled by the team, amounting to well over 180,000 files derived from the EAGLE-Europeana project and a range of other sources, including the expanded Roman Inscriptions of Britain online, which is currently having multiple epigraphic corpora added to it (e.g. the Vindolanda and Bloomberg tablets) by Scott Vanderbilt as part of LatinNow. All this epigraphic data will be leveraged for the specific research purposes of LatinNow and will be enhanced with new data produced by the researchers. We are looking to standardise vocabularies for metadata and indexing features, such as type of object, material and dating format, which vary in modern language and expression throughout the corpora we use. We will enrich the information available for local ancient languages and linguistic features, so that we can trace changes in literacy and language use more effectively and consistently. I will be working closely with our developer Scott Vanderbilt and will liaise frequently with the other team members to provide training, help and advice on working with the database. An integral part of my work will be supporting the team in adding sociolinguistic data to our material and facilitating their use of the database following user-experience feedback.

An entry from Scott’s Roman Inscriptions of Britain Online

A very exciting part of this process for me is the use, reuse and further enhancement of already existing digital epigraphic corpora. So far, I have worked on producing such resources rather than mining and manipulating data from them for new research. Reuse and repurposing of open access data forms a key part of sustainability of electronic resources, helps us avoid reinventing the wheel and ensures longevity and wider dissemination of  research. We are very grateful to our colleagues from a range of different projects (for example, EAGLE, Hesperia, AELAW) for their invaluable help and generosity.

Simona with the marmor Parium

In addition, being part of LatinNow will give me the opportunity to gain experience working on epigraphic material from the western provinces, as my own research and work to date has focused more on the eastern provinces. There are many parallels to be drawn in terms of multilingual competence of local populations, however I am curious to explore the differences and specific sociolinguistic factors in the changes of language use in the west.

By Anna Willi

Interdisciplinary research can be daunting. It forces us to look beyond our expertise, to leave our comfort zone, to embrace those white areas on the map of our knowledge. But as new physical boundaries seem to be created all around us, it is more important than ever to keep an open mind, and interdisciplinary research forces us to do just that. It breaks up boundaries, opens up pathways to collaboration and renders shared features visible. Crucially, it can prove very fruitful for difficult research questions for which we rely on tricky evidence.

Anna deciphering a milestone inscription

The potential of this kind of approach is what has always motivated my research questions. When I started studying Latin Literature and Linguistics at the University of Zürich (Switzerland), I soon felt that by studying texts alone I was missing something, so I chose Ancient History and Classical Archaeology as minors. Ever since, I have been convinced that combining written and material evidence opens up new perspectives and allows us to ask new and intriguing questions. LatinNow uses an interdisciplinary approach to ask a number of such questions, and I am excited to be joining the team as a Research Fellow for Germania superior.

Germania superior is my home province, as it were. I grew up in Switzerland where I studied and wrote my PhD-thesis at the University of Zürich. For my PhD-thesis, I combined literary, epigraphic, juridical and material evidence to investigate the use and performance of irrigation in Roman western Europe. This research has left me with a strong awareness of the way in which people shape their environment, and for social and economic factors in this process. It is however the second focus area of my work that has me particularly excited about working with LatinNow: Epigraphy. I have been lucky enough to collaborate in a number of epigraphic projects since being an undergrad, including fieldwork that took me as far as Bulgaria and Cyprus. Most recently, however, I have mainly worked on inscriptions in Germania superior, for the new edition of CIL XIII.

Anna inside the Albarracin-Cella aqueduct

Inscriptions will be central to my research for LatinNow, and in my opinion they are a particularly fascinating kind of evidence. They are at the same time textual and material, and because they have not been copied numerous times over the centuries, they provide a window into the past that feels very immediate. Unlike the literary texts we know from school, inscriptions also come in various shapes and size. We find them on stone altars, pieces of leather, wooden tablets, bronze votives, drinking cups, bread and brothel walls. They were incised, scribbled, scratched, stamped and painted, they were conceived and written by people from all walks of life – and they can to some extent betray the linguistic reality in which their writers lived.

In Germania superior, this reality must have been rather diverse. Covering parts of modern Germany, Switzerland and France, the province was established under the emperor Domitian to comprise areas that had previously been part of Gaul and under Roman rule for some time, but also a stretch of the very edge of the empire along the German limes, where military presence was strong. Its population included people with Italian, Germanic or Celtic heritage as well as soldiers from other parts of the empire. Various languages must have been spoken in the streets of Mogontiacum, Argentorate or Augusta Raurica. However, our written evidence hardly does this diversity justice: with a few exceptions, to our knowledge the language commonly used for writing was Latin (though it sometimes contains traces of other languages in it). This makes literacy an important factor in studying the spread and use of Latin in Germania superior, and this is where new insights can be expected from the combination of epigraphic evidence with material evidence of writing equipment such as styli or ink pots. One particularly exciting part of my work with LatinNow will be to contextualise such finds within the epigraphic landscape.

The inscription of Togirix

Grasping language use without being able to ask speakers about it is less than straightforward. We may never know why the owner of a 2^nd century villa near Bern decided to adorn the walls of their cryptoporticus with inscriptions that contain Greek, Gaulish and Latin language material (AE 2004, 991-995), or which language a certain Togirix from Eburodunum, who has a Celtic name and set up a dedication for Mercurius, Apollo and Minerva in Latin, spoke with his parent Meta (CIL XIII 5055). But looking at social and other phenomena that define this part of the Roman empire, there are other questions that we can ask. What role did Latin play in this multilingual environment and how did it come to play this role? How did different kinds of settlements, the diverse population and military presence influence the spread and use of Latin? And how is it different from what we know about Roman Britain or Spain? I look forward to delving into such questions, and to breaking up boundaries, opening up pathways to collaboration and rendering common features visible as part of an international and interdisciplinary team, collaborating to investigate a part of complex history that we all share.

 

This summer the LatinNow team went through a lengthy recruitment process to hunt for two world-class Research Fellows who would work on LatinNow’s most westerly area, the Iberian peninsula, and the most easterly, the Germanies, Noricum and Raetia. The problem was not that these were hard to find, but that there are so many excellent researchers in this field: over 50 applied, the majority based on the Continent and well qualified. This highlights the interest and specialism in ancient epigraphies and, in a period where opportunities in academia are few and far between, the value of the support from funders such as the ERC. In mid-September the LatinNow team was delighted to welcome two fantastic Fellows.

Noemí Moncunill Martí has taken on the Iberian peninsula. Noemí completed her PhD at the University of Barcelona, and has worked in different Universities in Spain, at the Sorbonne, Paris, and at KCL, London. She is a renowned expert on the Palaeohispanic languages, whose books include an introduction to Iberian (with Javier Velaza), a lexicon of Iberian inscriptions, a book on Iberian personal names from Catalonia and a forthcoming volume in the prestigious series Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum. On LatinNow she will be using her deep knowledge of the indigenous communities to understand the process of Latinization in the peninsula, starting with a fascinating period of change in the Republican period.

Map from Hesperia showing palaeohispanic inscriptions after the 3^rd century and Latin Republican inscriptions. © 2005 Javier de Hoz and Daniel Romero. Departamento de Filología Griega y Lingüística Indoeuropea · Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

 

Francesca Cotugno has recently completed a doctoral thesis based jointly at the University of Pisa and Ghent on the sociolinguistic variation in non-literary documents from Roman Britain. She has published several articles on Latin linguistics and has already spent time at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford, using Reflectance Transformation Imaging to try to read stylus tablets from Britannia. On LatinNow she will be using an interdisciplinary methodology to explore the sociolinguistic complexity of our eastern provinces. It will be exciting for Francesca to work on Latin materials from the Continent, from where many of the authors of the Vindolanda tablets, on which she has worked extensively, come.

Letter from Vindolanda from Chrauttius to Veldeius. © Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, The British Museum and other copyright holders.