Within about a century of the earliest inventions of writing in southern Iraq and Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, a third writing system was invented in southwestern Iran. This writing is called proto-Elamite, and it has remained undeciphered, even though a large number of tablets (now over 1,700) have been available for study since the early twentieth century. The name proto-Elamite is a conventional label, not meant to imply a known language, that was coined by V. Scheil. Proto- Elamite is a distinct corpus from the much later Linear Elamite writing system. With increasing digital documentation of this corpus, new avenues of research have opened, and over the past five years an interdisciplinary team of researchers has been making insights by combining traditional knowledge of the corpus with techniques developed in computational linguistics.