CSMC Newsletter

We are deeply saddened by the death of our colleague, Professor Dr Bruno Reudenbach (1952–2025). He was one of the longest-standing members of the CSMC, having shaped and supported it since its very beginnings with great expertise, commitment, and passion. The first expert for European manuscript cultures to join what was then a small group of specialists in Asian and African manuscripts (Forschergruppe ‘Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa’), he was instrumental in establishing both the Sonderforschungsbereich ‘Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa, and Europe’ and its successor, the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’. 

Great success for two of our researchers: the Indologist Suganya Anandakichenin and Márton Vér, a historian specialising in Central Asia, have each been awarded the prestigious five-year grant to carry out ambitious research projects. Suganya’s project will focus on Manipravalam, a hybrid language that emerged in the Tamil region of South India and played an important role in the history of this region. Due to its complexity, it has hardly been researched so far. Márton’s project is called ‘ReCent’ and will shed new light on the history of the Silk Road, challenging Eurocentric and Sinocentric perspectives and focusing on the underappreciated role of Central Asian peoples like the Uyghurs.

‘Pearls and corals’ – the meaning of the Manipravalam language’s name is as poetic as the language itself is important to the history of South India. Still, it has hardly been researched. In our interview, Suganya Anandakichenin talks about her plans to change this in her upcoming ERC project. ‘A particularly interesting area of our study is how the usage of Manipravalam differs between traditions, and how shifts in theology or cultural context are reflected in linguistic choices. By combining philological methods with theological and historical analysis, we hope to gain a more nuanced understanding of cultural exchange in South India.’

In the historiography of the Silk Road, Central Asian peoples such as the Uyghurs have so far played only a minor role. Wrongly so, argues historian Márton Vér. In his ERC project, he challenges Eurocentric and Sinocentric perspectives and turns the history of the complex supra-network on its head. ‘Much of what is commonly assumed about the Silk Road comes from sources created far from the central regions of the Silk Road – often in Chinese, Middle Eastern, or European centres of power, thousands of kilometres away. These texts provide sweeping narratives that make them easily accessible, which is why they became a favoured foundation for historians. Problematically, however, these accounts distort how exchanges truly functioned on the ground.’

The 47th volume of Studies in Manuscript Cultures takes its readers to the places where large quantities of written artefacts are stored, organised, and preserved: archives. Despite their central importance, these have long been neglected by research. The literature has been dominated by an idealistic notion of ‘the archive’ as an immaterial repository of knowledge. Material Cultures of Archiving: An Introduction to a Global and Historical Practice, in contrast, shows in detail that ‘working with archived artefacts implies dirt, sweat, and physical labour’, as Markus Friedrich, the editor of the volume, emphasises. The volume is a key result of the work in the ‘Archiving Artefacts’ research field of the UWA Cluster of Excellence. 

Everyday writings, often following no fixed plan, are likely to account for the majority of all handwritten production, both historically and even more so in the digital present. In Accumulating Notes: Note-taking and Multilayered Written Artefacts, they take centre stage. Drawing on examples from the Middle Ages to the 20th century and from a wide range of writing cultures, the contributions to this volume of Studies in Manuscript Cultures adopt a stratigraphic approach to notes, understanding these written artefacts as ‘evolving entities’. Edited by José Maksimczuk and Thies Staack, the volume is the result of the collaboration between two research fields at UWA, ‘(Re-)Shaping Written Artefacts’ and ‘Keeping Note(book)s’.

They are the raw material of every historical analysis and interpretation: sources, either in the form of archaeological finds or transmitted literature. These sources are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle from which we piece together a picture of the past. Unfortunately, this puzzle is grossly incomplete. Missing Evidence in the Study of Ancient Cultures: Methodological Reflections and Case Studies on Fragmentary Sources, the 50th volume in the Studies in Manuscript Cultures series, provides a detailed assessment of the problems of completely missing, quantitatively insufficient, and qualitatively insufficient evidence, and examines how researchers can engage productively with these gaps when reconstructing the past. 

The CSMC computer scientist has won an Excellent Oral Presentation Award at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Soft Computing & Machine Intelligence (ISCMI) 2025, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil! He received the award for his paper on ‘Character Localization in Degraded Historical Documents via Heatmap-guided UNet3+ with Application on Palimpsests’. At the CSMC, Mahdi leads a project on ‘Generative AI for Revealing Palimpsests’. The outcomes of this research are already being applied by members of the project on ‘The Development of Literacy in the Caucasian Territories’ (DeLiCaTe) to reveal undertexts in Georgian and Armenian manuscripts. They are also being used in the ‘Recovery of Writing in Large Collections’ project to support text retrieval and the development of MSI‑based methods. Congratulations, Mahdi!

During his recent trip to Nigeria, CSMC researcher Dmitry Bondarev visited the University of Maiduguri (UniMaid) and the Centre for Kanuri Ajami and Qur’anic Studies (CKAQS) to pave the way for future initiatives to enhance the conservation and study of written heritage in North East Nigeria. A key area of collaboration with UniMaid is the safeguarding of manuscripts in North East Nigeria. The protection and study of written cultural heritage are central goals of the Centre for Research and Documentation in Trans-Saharan Studies (CTSS), established at UniMaid in 1986. Likewise, the initial exchange of ideas with representatives of CKAQS is anticipated to pave the way for future collaboration in the preservation and study of Kanuri Ajami heritage.

In late 2025, CSMC researchers Małgorzata Grzelec and Laura Gallardo Domínguez took a journey right into the heart of Mexico’s material writing culture. Following their presentations on synchrotron experiments, which they conducted within their research projects at the CSMC, at the Simposio de Ciencias del Patrimonio, a heritage science symposium held at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the two researchers went on a field trip that brought them together with local scholars and scientists specialising in the history and technology of Mesoamerican papermaking, as well as historical dye and pigment production. They have shared a report about their journey on our blog.