Topic FACEM: A Repository for Ancient Ceramic Fabrics from the Mediterranean About the speaker Barbara Borgers holds a Hertha Firnberg Fellowship at the Department of Classical Archaeology, University of Vienna. As a ceramic scientist, she has worked in various interdisciplinary research projects of heritage communities, museums, and commercial archaeology companies across Europe, and she is currently the PI of the project ‘Cooking ware as Indicator for Regional Trade and Exchange in 4th-1st c. BC Central Italy’. Her research focuses on the cultural biography of ceramics. It explores how they were produced, traded, exchanged, and used. It covers the Bronze Age, Iron Age, the Roman era and Late Antiquity, in a geographical area stretching from central Europe to Jordan. In general, she seeks to answer key questions about knowledge transfer, social cohesion, and skill acquisition. More specifically, she considers technological variability in ceramics, adopting an archaeological science approach, and she examines the role of these objects in creating, maintaining, and displaying social identities in workshops, as well as in domestic, religious, and burial contexts. Her interest in digital archaeology focuses on a GIS database and the development of an advanced AI application to capture information from ceramics, such as morphology, composition, and fingerprints, for a variety of research purposes. | 
