PLOMAT · Plotting the material flows of commonplace Late Bronze Age Seals in Western Eurasia

Plotting the material flows of commonplace Late Bronze Age Seals in Western Eurasia

The aim of PLOMAT, an innovative project on commonplace cylinder seals of Late Bronze Age Western Eurasia, was to offer new perspectives on the study of non-élite populations and the small-scale networks that operated at a time of art internationalisation in the ancient world. PLOMAT mapped the flows of materials and ideas in the Late Bronze Age by studying cylinder seals, which were an important and widely used class of object, invented in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium as a control mechanism tool and an important status indicator. Combining Digital Humanities and scientific material analysis with innovative archaeological and art historical theories, it studied for the first time the production and consumption of ‘commonplace’ cylinder seals in mid-second millennium BCE, which spread over a wide area from the Eastern Mediterranean to Central Western Asia. They were seemingly produced en masse from ‘low-cost’ materials (glazed clay, frit or sintered quartz) and display designs of low-quality. These artefacts represented an ideal subject for studying the flow of ideas across large areas in the ancient world. By developing and implementing novel computational methods and material analysis, and engaging with a bottom-up social archaeological approach, PLOMAT charted movements of people and ideas throughout East and West, providing for the first time a corpus of material analysis characterization for vitreous materials, and exploring the appropriation and/or rejection of Syro-Mesopotamian material and visual culture. PLOMAT unveiled the connectivities of societies through exploring the seals’ spread – and questioned whether it was the objects themselves which were actually travelling, or rather their images and thus ideas, or the technology of making such materials. This reflects upon how and why such seals were appropriated by individuals negotiating their identities in places far from centres of power, during this important transitional period, in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. It therefore uncovered elements of non-élite history of the region and its peoples. PLOMAT had three overall objectives: 1. to determine workshops of production for these so-called ‘Common Mitanni’ cylinder seals. This was done utilising two methods: a) by determining how such Common Mitanni seals were produced; material characterisation established seal elemental composition, enabling a first level grouping of material and identification of workshops, and b) image-annotation tools helped determine whether the images and designs of these seals were imitated/locally produced or transferred. 2. in order to explore the socio-cultural context of their production and function, PLOMAT implemented a GIS framework to plot the spatial distribution of these seals, by applying quantitative and qualitative criteria to the material and their spread 3. and finally to develop a theoretical model of transcultural flows of ideas, materials and artefacts associated with non-élite populations, tracing mechanisms and unveiling socio-scapes of interactions in mid-second millennium BCE Western Eurasia through studying these so-called ‘Common Mitanni’ cylinder seals. These objectives have been reached through extensive research, training, networking, presentation of research, public engagement and forthcoming academic publication.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз