The aim of this project is to write a cultural history of 4000 years, localized on Elephantine Island in Egypt. Elephantine was a militarily and strategically very important island in the river Nile on the southern border of Egypt. No other settlement in Egypt is so well attested over such a long period of time. Its inhabitants form a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-religious community that left us vast amounts of written sources detailing their everyday lives from the Old Kingdom to beyond the Arab Conquest. Today, several thousand papyri and other manuscripts from Elephantine are scattered in more than 60 institutions across Europe and beyond. Their texts are written in different languages and scripts, including Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic and Arabic. 80% of these manuscripts are still unpublished and unstudied. The great challenge of this project is to use this material to answer three key questions covering: 1) Multiculturalism and identity between assimilation and segregation, 2) Organization of family and society, 3) Development of religions (Polytheism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Thus, access needs to be gained to these texts, making them publicly available in an open access online database. Links are to be identified between papyrus fragments from different collections and an international ‘papyrus puzzle’ will be undertaken, incorporating cutting-edge methods from digital humanities, physics and mathematics (e.g. for the virtual unfolding of papyri). Using this database with medical, religious, legal, administrative, even literary texts, the micro-history of the everyday life of the local and global (i.e. ‘glocal’) community of Elephantine will be studied within its socio-cultural setting in Egypt and beyond. It will be linked back to macro-historical questions and benefit from newly-introduced methodologies of global history: Elephantine can thus be used as a case study and a model for the past, present and future.

This project gathers, for the first time, the evidence for the development of the monetary economy of Anatolia, from the invention of coinage there in the late 7th century BC to the absorption of the region by Rome c. 30 BC. Using new digital technology, it organizes this evidence to deploy it for the first time to answer major questions concerning the economic history of this region over the longue durée. Part 1 creates a complete overview of the relevant coinages produced by c.300 cities, 4 empires, 6 kingdoms, and c.50 independent dynasts in this period and region. Delivered with established Linked Open Data technology, this framework amalgamates coins in 5 public collections to create a database of c.50,000 coins. This database will be used to quantify monetary production over time and place. Part 2 assembles for the first time a full record of published finds of coins from hoard and excavation contexts. This data will be amalgamated with that from Part 1 to produce a detailed mapping of movement of coinage over time and place. Part 3 assembles a checklist of epigraphic documents attesting to monetary behaviour across the period of interest. This will be analysed for types and change of monetary activity over time, thus overlaying the evidence from one discipline on that of another. Part 4 comprises a series of interdisciplinary enquiries into the change in the monetary economy based on data from Parts 1-3. Major questions regarding the purpose of coinage, extent of monetisation, and efficiency of transaction will be investigated. It also addresses questions that have dominated recent debates such as economic connectivity, the existence of networks, and economic balance between large states and small. CHANGE will offer a case study of what can be achieved through the marriage of ‘traditional’ research with new methods and tools created by ‘Digital Humanities’. It offers a model for the re-evaluation of the monetary economy of the whole Ancient Mediterranean.

Language leaves no trace in the fossil record. However, an important component of the human language capacity, symbolic combinatoriality, might have “fossilized” after all. In the Paleolithic, hominins have embarked on their journey from Africa into the rest of the world. On their way, they have left artefacts which provide a window into their mind. Some of these bear early examples of visual information encoding: geometric signs. In the Middle Paleolithic, when Homo neanderthalensis roamed the landscape, evidence for geometric signs is scarce. It is not before the Middle Stone Age in Africa, typically associated with Homo sapiens, that the first systematic industries emerge. By the time Homo sapiens arrives in Central Europe – in the Upper Paleolithic – the practice of using stones, beads, bone fragments, and figurines as information carriers has become part of everyday life. In fact, the abundance of geometric signs in these assemblages is only gradually coming to light via large-scale collection efforts. This project proposes to marry the growing body of archaeological data with state-of-the-art tools from empirical linguistics to assess the Evolution of Visual Information Encoding (EVINE) in the human lineage. To this end, statistical measures based on information theory, quantitative linguistic laws, as well as classification algorithms need to be developed, and applied to sequences of paleolithic signs, ancient writing, and modern writing. Two core hypotheses are to be tested: First, paleolithic signs are statistically distinct from ancient and modern writing. Second, there was a combinatorial transition in the Upper Paleolithic of around 35 000 to 15 000 years ago. If the latter is verified, we would witness a major step towards modern visual information encoding – 10 000 years before the advent of ancient writing.

Diverging forces across European societies, most visible in both the contemporary nationalist movements and Islamist radicalization, demand a socially inclusive public memory. Its implementation calls for new strategies, practices, and infrastructures for staging and empowering membership and contribution of people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds for past and future development in Europe. To reach this goal, research needs to develop a comprehensive understanding on concepts, practices, and media infrastructures that facilitate the partaking of people from various backgrounds in the heritage building work of memory institutions (libraries, archives, and museums). The POEM-ETN will provide this comprehensive knowledge by studying in practice theoretical approaches on how connectivities are built by 1) institutions, 2) people and groups, and 3) media infrastructures for a socially inclusive, participatory heritage work and what facilitates or hinders collaboration. Therefore, a new generation of professionals will be trained through an innovative training programme and supervised by peer networks of transdisciplinary knowledge to act as change agents, brokers, and problem solvers in this contested field of heritage work. The comprehensive transdisciplinary composition of the consortium involving universities, memory institutions, civil society organisations, and SMEs from public and private sectors will therefore provide the POEM fellows with transdisciplinary knowledge on cultural and social analysis as well as on transferrable skills with respect to the changing socio-technical, organisational, legal, economic, and ethical issues to address future challenges for participatory memory work.

The three-year REACH project will establish a Social Platform as a sustainable space for meeting, discussion and collaboration by a wide-ranging network of development bodies, tourism, education, creative industries, cultural heritage professionals, academic experts, arts practitioners, professionals in archives and galleries, associations and interest groups representative of non-professionals and local societies, and policy-makers – all those with a stake in research in the field of culture and CH. The REACH Social Platform’s activities will have a twofold scope: - Support: to map and provide analysis of research results achieved in previous programmes, to identify current and emerging research trends, and to offer authoritative new knowledge of the CH field to the European Commission and policy makers; - Coordination: to offer benefits to its participants, expanding knowledge of complementary research domains, and of new participatory research methodologies, generating opportunities for cooperation, offering pathways to wider user engagement with research outputs. In the context of radical social changes taking place at global levels, Europe faces a serious challenge: the need for its citizens to live together in peace and mutual respect and to value and enjoy the diversity of cultures, which they bring to their respective societies. The REACH project is based on the proposition that CH plays an important role in contributing to social integration in Europe, and that a fuller and more detailed picture of the range, type and impact of research and participatory research methodologies, current and future, associated with these subjects will further enhance their potential for social good.