CSMC News (2025)

In 2022, a plagiarism scandal involving the forensic scientist Matthias Graw caused a stir. Graw was accused of plagiarising his doctoral thesis from a book that turned out to be a forgery. The CSMC’s Artefact Lab was involved in the analyses that led to his exoneration. Now the case is being heard...

Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and Malgorzata Grzelec want to understand the different technologies that have traditionally been used to produce arguably the most complex of all writing supports: paper. For this purpose, they are working together with the papermaker Gangolf Ulbricht.

Four professors are joining the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts, bringing expertise in four very different research areas: Barbara Henning in Turkish Studies, Cem Kara in Alevi Studies, Julia Schneider in Chinese Studies, and Agnes Weiß in Microbiology.

Congratulations to Ann Lauren Osthof on defending her dissertation, thus completing her PhD in Archaeology! The viva voce examination took place on 22 January 2025.

The Jerusalem guestbook of Miryam and Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl is a small object of only 200 pages – yet it opens doors to more stories than a single researcher can uncover. Sebastian Schirrmeister wants to use new digital techniques to explore this microcosm and link it to larger bodies of...

A TV documentary spotlights the spectacular case of the ‘Mummy Book’ – the supposedly oldest codex fragment in the world, found in Graz in 2023. It also shows the investigations of the object at the CSMC, which play a crucial role in clarifying the open questions surrounding the ‘Mummy Book’.

For our Mobile Lab, the turn of the year 2024/2025 was marked by a tour de force through northern Italy. In changing formation, the team spent several weeks in Venice and Verona, examining a series of spectacular objects in famous museums and libraries.

Across time and space, and for a range of reasons and motives, humans have been establishing practices and media for cultivating and presenting knowledge about past and present kin. The new volume of SMC is about one of the most important material manifestations of this knowledge: handwritten...

Numerous artefacts from one of the world’s most important collections of Islamic manuscripts are affected by an unusual form of degradation. In late 2024, a delegation from Tunisia brought 15 objects to Hamburg and analysed them together with the experts of the Artefact Lab at the Centre for the...

How should researchers deal with objects of unclear provenance? As a lawyer, teacher, and scholar specialising in art and cultural heritage law, Leila Amineddoleh offers expert advice on this issue. In our interview, she talks about the most common questions researchers ask her.