Lucia Maria Orlandi, École française de Rome

Signacula or markers are matrices made of metal, ceramic, stone or wood, bearing text, signs, and/or iconographic motives, and designed to stamp various materials. Their use is particularly widespread in the Roman Empire, especially in the Italian peninsula, it continues well into the Early Byzantine times and, for certain Christian developments, even today.They share many similarities with Byzantine seals (and their matrices), especially with the earliest examples of the latter, bearing shorter texts: the stamped writing is standardized and therefore well identifiable, combining information and validation. Markers were used by individuals, as well as institutions and communities (e.g., professional guilds or religious bodies) to assert ownership, specify provenance, guarantee authenticity and/or integrity, especially of commodities. Markers may also have a magical-religious function, displaying prophylactic/apotropaic features, and play a role in religious rituals (e.g., Christian Eucharistic bread-stamps). Despite these similarities, the study of signacula-markers has had until recently a rather limited focus, either on the Roman period, or on the Christian artefacts for the later period, and has never been brought into dialogue with other sphragistic material. The MSCA PF project "SIGN-IT- Signacula in Roman and Post-Roman Italy: marking religious and cultural identity (2nd-11th c. CE)", funded by the EU, aims to bridge this gap, by implementing a new database of signacula, built upon the EpiDoc and SigiDoc standards, fostering comparisons with other types of sphragistic writing and objects, such as seals. Based on the first data gathered by the SIGN-IT project, the proposed paper will present the areas where the study of the late Roman and the earliest Byzantine lead seals can contribute to the study of signacula-markers, and vice versa: from the possible reconstruction of the field of use, to the type of text and information conveyed.