Location BIAA, Atatürk Bulvarı 154/1 and online
Date and time
Wednesday 14 January 2026
14:30 - 14:30 (London GMT)
17:30 - 17:30 (Ankara UTC+3)
Speakers
Dries Daems
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Pottery studies are the bread and butter of most archaeological projects in Mediterranean archaeology.
Due to their abundance, ceramics have provided critical insights into the social life of past societies, their economic organisation and production, cultural practices, and more. Recent digital and computational advances continue to open up new windows for enhancing our understanding of the past through this important category of material culture. In this talk, I will present some results of my recent work on Hellenistic pottery from Anatolia, combining tried and tested methods in material studies with innovative digital approaches. Surveying applications in computational modelling, network science, 3D scanning, and machine learning, I aim to show some glimpses of promising ways forward for the field.
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Dries Daems is an archaeologist specializing in the Iron Age to Hellenistic Mediterranean. He studies a wide range of topics, including social complexity,urbanism, connectivity and information exchange, artisanal production, and human-environment interactions, through a combination of complexity theory,computational modelling, network science, and pottery studies. He is currently Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam and has previously held positions at KULeuven, Koç University, Helsinki University, and Middle East Technical University. He has participated in fieldwork projects in Türkiye (Sagalassos, Türkmen-Karahöyük, Komana), Cyprus, Jordan, and Greece.