Colloque international "From the Sea to Networks: Lilybaeum and the Challenges of the Ancient Mediterranean in the Digital Age", Marsala, 15–16 septembre 2026.
Les résumés présentés ici reflètent les thématiques et les objectifs de From the Sea to Networks: Lilybaeum and the Challenges of the Ancient Mediterranean in the Digital Age.
Lilybaeum and the Sea: Resources and Sources for "Navigating" the Past
Maria Grazia Griffo (Parco archeologico di Lilibeo-Marsala)
This contribution presents the Museo Lilibeo and its catalogue, Lilibeo e il Mare. Il Museo Archeologico Regionale di Marsala (edited by E. Caruso and M. G. Griffo, Palermo, 2024), as both resources and sources for archaeological research. They represent not only the outcome of a process of critical selection and study of archaeological materials, but also a body of data that can be structured and sustainably managed according to new models developed within the field of Digital Humanities, creating new opportunities for research, innovation, and collaboration.
The archaeological research methodology underpinning the museum's curatorial approach—based on the selection of materials according to their archaeological context, the reorganisation and integration of assemblages from the extensive necropoleis of Lilybaeum, and the identification of previously unpublished or little-known phases of occupation and abandonment of the ancient settlement—has significantly enriched our understanding of the ancient city and its uninterrupted relationship with the sea.
Today, this body of knowledge constitutes the starting point for innovative and interdisciplinary research projects, offering new perspectives for the study, management, and digital enhancement of the archaeological heritage of ancient Lilybaeum.
FAIR Data and Open Science: Concepts and Principles. The activities of the SBA and the Unipa Libraries Portal. Research Data in the Humanities: Tools and Practices
Valeria Tardo (University of Palermo)
This paper provides a brief overview of the concepts of FAIR data and the principles of Open Science, tracing their development from the emergence of these concepts to the evolution of European and Italian policies and regulations.
It then introduces the University of Palermo's Library System portal and the support services it provides for the archiving and dissemination of scholarly outputs. Particular attention will be devoted to the Research and Open Science sections, highlighting their practical resources and opportunities for further exploration.
Finally, the paper will present selected tools and practices for implementing Open Science, with particular emphasis on the field of archaeology.
The impact of digital technologies on field surveys: Is our approach to the management and collection of archaeological data effective?
Giuseppe Guarino (Independent Researcher)
The adoption of digital technologies in archaeological field surveys represents a significant methodological evolution, transforming practices and offering unprecedented improvements in data recording, analysis and interpretation. However, critical challenges remain in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the data collected, particularly with regard to spatial recording and subsequent analysis.
This presentation critically appraises the efficacy of contemporary digital approaches by integrating traditional grid-based methodologies, centred on 10-metre square units, with mobile free and open-source software (FLOSS) geographic information system applications (QGIS and QField). The study has assessed improvements and persisting challenges associated with digital data collection. Key methodological elements were systematically examined, including inter-surveyor variability and environmental factors such as soil visibility and weather conditions. Statistical analysis provided evidence of the critical influence of these factors on artefact quantity and spatial distribution.
Challenges and opportunities of the project “Archaeological Map of Lilybaeum”
Mauro Lo Brutto (Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi di Palermo), Martina Seifert (Institut für Klassische Archäologie, Universität Hamburg), Aurelio Burgio (Dipartimento Culture e Società, Università di Palermo), Antonella Mandruzzato (Dipartimento Culture e Società, Università di Palermo), Aylin Güngör (Institut für Klassische Archäologie, Universität Hamburg), Nils Thiele-O’Sullivan (Institut für Klassische Archäologie, Universität Hamburg)
The ‘Archaeological Map of Lilybaeum’ project is the result of the long-standing scientific cooperation between Hamburg and Palermo Universities and the Archaeological Park of Marsala. The main objective of the project is to create an archaeological map of the ancient city of Lilybaeum, using the most innovative and cutting-edge technologies for the acquisition, management and analysis of archaeological data. The workflow within the current project consists of four main parts: data acquisition through fieldwork, systematic compilation of pre-existing data (Legacy data), data evaluation and interpretation, and public outreach.
Over the years, various field research methods have been investigated to gather all the data required for the archaeological map. In particular, topographical, laser scanning and photogrammetric (aerial and terrestrial) surveys have been carried out during several steps of the work. This approach allowed us to explore the impact of the results obtained from these different methods on already existing research hypotheses and the ways in which the resulting map enhances our knowledge of the ancient city of Lilybaeum.
All the archaeological data within the Archaeological Park, as well as those buried under the modern city, have been fed into a new archaeological Web-GIS, as a starting point for archaeological analysis and for clarifying issues relating to urban development.
NaviGIS – Digital Data Management in Nautical Archaeology
Vincent Dumas (Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, Centre Camille Jullian, Aix-en-Provence, France), Juliette Bolloch (Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, Centre Camille Jullian, Aix-en-Provence, France), Mathieu Coulon (Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, TELEMMe, Aix-en-Provence, France), Giulia Boetto (Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, Centre Camille Jullian, Aix-en-Provence, France)
“NaviGIS – Digital Data Management in Nautical Archaeology” is a pilot project developed at the Centre Camille Jullian UMR 7299 (CNRS, Aix Marseille University) as part of the Franco-Croatian mission “ADRIBOATS – Ships and Navigation in the Eastern Adriatic in Antiquity.” Its aim is to manage, in a consistent and standardized manner, the digital data resulting from the study of several ancient shipwrecks, in accordance with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) of Open Science.
Based on a web-mapping architecture, the project enables the organization of a rich and varied body of documentation, primarily digital, including photographs, 2D and 3D graphic materials, and textual resources (reports, spreadsheets, publications).
NaviGIS provides structured, visual, and interactive access, supporting the scientific use of the data through open access, their dissemination to a wide audience, as well as their long-term preservation and archiving.
Modeling Mediterranean Maritime Networks: Integrating Ancient Texts and Modern Logbooks through the SeaLiT Ontology
Athina Kritsotaki, Chryssoula Bekiari, Nikos Kontonasios, Pavlos Fafalios, and Yiannis Tzitzikas
Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Greece
The study of Mediterranean maritime networks has traditionally been divided between qualitatively interpreted ancient sources and quantitatively rich modern archival records. This paper proposes a unified, diachronic framework for analyzing these networks by leveraging the ontology developed within the SeaLiT Project. As an extension of CIDOC CRM, the SeaLiT ontology enables the semantic modeling of heterogeneous maritime data by formalizing entities such as ships, ports, actors, cargoes, and voyages, as well as the relationships that connect them.
The paper demonstrates how this ontological framework can be applied to two fundamentally different corpora: (a) ancient literary sources which provide fragmentary and interpretative evidence of maritime connectivity; and (b) nineteenth- and twentieth-century ship logbooks preserved across multiple archives in Greece and Spain, which offer structured, high-resolution records of routes, environmental conditions, and commercial activity. By translating both source types into a shared event-based semantic structure, the ontology facilitates their integration into interoperable datasets and knowledge graphs.
The paper argues that ontological modeling not only enhances data interoperability but also reshapes historical inquiry by enabling the comparison of disparate epistemologies within a common analytical framework.
A database of 3D models for the epigraphs of the ancient Lilybaeum
Leonarda Fazio (Dipartimento Culture e Società, Università degli Studi di Palermo), Maria Grazia Griffo (Museo Archeologico Lilibeo-Marsala), Milena Cudia (Comune di Marsala, Complesso Monumentale S. Pietro)
The epigraphs of the ancient Lilybaeum, mainly dating between the middle and late Imperial age (2nd–4th century AD), represent a valuable source of information for reconstructing and telling the history of the Punic-Roman city, its institutions, cults, public works and people who distinguished themselves for their role in the city community. For this reason, with the aim of virtually bringing together the epigraphs currently preserved in the Regional Archaeological Museum of Lilibeo-Marsala and partially in the Civic Museum of the city, a project to enhance epigraphs starts in 2023 as part of the new exposition of the Civic Museum. The first step concerns the acquisition of high-resolution 3D models with photogrammetric survey, then optimized for virtual navigation from the touchscreen totem dedicated to the epigraphs and located in the Civic Museum close to some originals. Into the totem, digital copies of the epigraphs can be accessible and usable by the two sections organized for both museums respectively, where each specimen is accompanied by the original text, translation and a comment on the historical content.
Ontologies and Neural Networks: A Neuro-Symbolic approach for Epigraphy contextualization
Emma Martinez (Université de Toulon), Bruno Baudoin (Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, Centre Camille Jullian, Aix-en-Provence, France), Stéphanie Satre (Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, Centre Camille Jullian, Aix-en-Provence, France), Julien Seinturier (Université de Toulon/Laboratoire d’Informatique et des Systèmes)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now widely used in the humanities, particularly in History and Archaeology, where connectionist approaches such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are well-suited for processing image and text corpora. Several platforms have been developed to characterize archaeological objects based on images or to contextualize texts based on their content.
Digital Epigraphy also benefits from these advances by combining the power of CNNs, to extract transcriptions from images of inscriptions, with that of LLMs, to contextualize the extracted transcriptions. However, recent studies have pointed out that these purely connectionist approaches do not yield the expected results on inscription corpora. Indeed, it appears that using text alone does not allow reliable contextualization. The addition of certain knowledge and data, such as paleography or stratigraphy, significantly improves the reliability of the process.
The EPI2DAP (Epigraphic Data Analysis & Data Processing) project proposes to expand the processing of inscriptions by using connectionist approaches (CNN, LLM) coupled with knowledge representation (KR) in the form of Ontologies that can represent paleographic and stratigraphic information. This integration enables the creation of a semantic database (Triple Store) that allows inscriptions to be contextualized through reasoning. This approach preserves the performance of CNNs and LLMs in extracting transcriptions and paleographic glyphs to populate the semantic database, while leveraging expert knowledge to provide explainable contextualization.
The proposed methodology was implemented using the EpiCherchell corpus, a collaborative online open-access database for the study of ancient inscriptions. The first line of research concerned the automatic recognition of ancient letters and symbols and the creation of a protocol for automatic character recognition on Latin inscriptions, integrating chronological proposals. The second line of research concerned the proposal of an ontological formalism allowing to represent the complex information composing the EpiCherchell database by extending it with notions of temporality and spatiality and thus allow both inference and interrogation. This new formalism is integrated within the Epigraphic Ontology (EPONT) consortium. The main focus now is the population of a semantic database with automatically extracted information.
Recueil des résumés en cours de préparation
Les contributions complémentaires sont actuellement en cours d'édition et de mise en forme.
La version complète du recueil des résumés sera mise à disposition prochainement.
