**The ERC STONE-MASTERS project is delighted to welcome Dr Martyna Świerk to the team. Martyna is a historian and epigraphist specialising in the epigraphic cultures of the western Roman Empire, with a particular focus on the North African provinces and the social functions of inscriptions. She earned her PhD with distinction from the University of Wrocław (2023) for a dissertation on the epigraphic society of Roman Carthage.

Following her doctorate, she joined the University of Warsaw as a postdoctoral researcher on the project Epigraphy and Identity in the Early Byzantine Near East (NCN Sonata 15, 2019/35/D/HS3/01872), where she analysed the roles of Aramaic inscriptions in sacred spaces in Roman Palestine, managed the project database (EpIdentity), and edited epigraphic data in EpiDoc. She is also a member of the research team for Epigraphic Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East: Status, Display, Democracy, and Identity (NCN Maestro 13, 2021/42/A/HS3/0042), investigating epigraphic cultures in selected cities of Asia Minor (Mylasa, Halikarnassos). Her research stays include La Sapienza University of Rome, the University of Bologna, and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Berlin; she has also taken part in excavations at Nea Paphos (Cyprus). In 2024, as a Foundation for Polish Science START Fellow, she held a fellowship at the University of Oxford. Within STONE-MASTERS, Martyna leads prosopographical research on craftspeople and oversees the collection and ingestion of mosaic data into the Digital Atlas of Workshops in Epigraphy (DAWE).