Material Histories, Digital Futures: Rethinking Cylinder Seals

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• Lara Bampfield (University of Oxford)
• Tuesday 03 March 2026, 17:15-19:30
• McDonald Seminar Room, Department of Archaeology.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Lucy Emanuel.

This paper explores how digital imaging, structured annotation, and computational analysis can enrich the study of Mesopotamian cylinder seals. Drawing on recent work undertaken for the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, I demonstrate how high resolution digital unwrappings generated by the SIANE structured-light scanner can be converted into reproducible datasets through controlled-vocabulary annotation in VIA . These annotations, exported into interoperable standards such as COCO and W3C Web Annotation, enable researchers to search for motifs within seal imagery rather than catalogue entries alone, making it possible to examine spatial patterning, motif co-occurrence, and the reuse of iconographic forms at scale. Using case studies from collections in Paris and Oxford, the paper also considers how digital documentation reveals the complex material biographies of seals. High resolution imaging of seal ends, surface geometry, and erased inscriptions makes visible the extent to which seals were cut, re-cut, and repurposed from the Ur III to the Old Babylonian period. When combined with computer vision approaches trained on annotated corpora, these methods provide new opportunities for identifying re-carving practices, tracing motif transmission, and examining workshop traditions. Taken together, these approaches illustrate how digital documentation and computational tools can complement established methods in glyptic studies, opening up further avenues for careful, corpus-based exploration.

This talk is part of the Ancient Near East Seminar Series series.

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• Ancient Near East Seminar Series
• McDonald Seminar Room, Department of Archaeology

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