Karanis: Archives and Futures in an ancient Egyptian town

University of Michigan archaeologists excavated over 100 structures in the ancient Egyptian town of Karanis (modern Kom Aushim) between 1924 and 1935. These structures yielded over 60,000 artifacts, 2,500 papyri and 1,100 potsherds with writing. Taken together, this seems to be a wonderful archive to mine for clues about daily life in an ancient town in the first three centuries CE. But is it? This talk will present some of the challenges of dealing with this wealth of material from ancient Karanis, but also point at some of the potentialities of this site through a multi-disciplinary and collaboratory approach.