This project aims to organise an international research network of papyrologists and archaeologists from Leiden, Ann Arbor and Lecce. It will focus the expertise of the partners on an important but thus far partly overlooked collection of Roman-era papyrus texts from the ancient Egyptian village of Soknopaiou Nesos (Dimê), leading to the development of new research questions regarding the role of writing in ancient societies. The joint research will include the renewed study of the contents of the relevant texts from Soknopaiou Nesos, and the new study of the site’s archaeological documentation from the 1931-1932 excavations by Ann Arbor, integrated into the extensive site documentation assembled by the ongoing excavations by the University of Salento (Lecce). The Soknopaiou Nesos papyri will be virtually placed back into their original archaeological setting so that a fuller picture emerges of writing practices and attitudes to written materials in Soknopaiou Nesos than could ever be obtained by the study of texts and excavation documentation in isolation. Through the study of the papyri and their archaeological context, the project aims to set the agenda for further research in the nascent field of the materiality of written sources. The project will result in three papers (in peer reviewed journals) on the archaeology and papyri of Roman Soknopaiou Nesos, forge a network of world-class specialists in the field of Papyrology, Archaeology and Egyptology, and develop a large-scale research project on the broader topic of the materiality of written sources.