1.2: Scope and Impetus
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This book grapples with the issue of writing and related graphical modes as forms of material culture. The diverse case studies are unified and underpinned by the notion that writing is fundamentally material — that it is preceded by and constituted through the material practices of human practitioners. From this vantage point, understandings of things that are written must therefore go beyond study of textual meanings and take account of the material worlds in which writing is inextricably embedded. In aligning along this common theme, analytical and interpretive priority is given, not to the linguistic and semantic meanings of graphical marks, but to their physicality and the ways in which this relates to creators and users. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 bce to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the papers bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing, its meaning and significance. As such, these case studies also contribute to an emerging discourse (below) on ‘writing’ and ‘materiality’. They also contribute to the development of contextualising paradigms equipped to cope with the complexities of graphical cultures in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to them through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices. While an increasing emphasis on materiality has characterised many fields of archaeological research over the last 20 years, studies of writing have lagged behind in this respect. The main reason is a long established and difficult-to-shift disciplinary division between archaeology and philology, in which the philologists — often brought in by archaeologists as technical experts whose interpretations are hard to challenge — have had the upper hand. This has led to an emphasis on the content of inscriptions and other writing, concentrating on languages, scripts and the semantic meanings of texts. These studies not only neglect materiality, which is our focus here, but they also tend to neglect context (both the specific archaeological context of the artefact, and the broader cultural and historical context into which written surfaces fit). Studies of content, context and materiality are all necessary for a holistic study of writing and many of the papers in this volume, while concentrating on material aspects of writing, do also deal with the meaning of the texts being studied and the contexts of their production and use. Our concern with the question of writing artefactuality was prompted by methodological problems arising out of our own research on ancient writing (e.g. Piquette 2007; 2008; 2013; forthcoming; Whitehouse 2008; 2012). Our interest in exploring writing materialities cross-culturally is also inspired by the work of several scholars who also challenge the traditional disciplinary division between archaeology and philology (e.g. Moreland 2001; 2006; cf. Bottéro 1992; 2000). “Textaided archaeology” (Hawkes 1954; see also Little 1992) and discussions of text and archaeology come closer to providing integrated understandings of the written pasts but nevertheless embody a paradigm where text is a largely immaterial source about the past. Moreland and others have highlighted the methodological drawbacks of de-materialising treatments of written objects, and while a gradual ‘material turn’ is underway in some areas (Andrén 1998; Gardner 2003: especially 2, 6; Matthews 2003: 56–64), an emphatic disciplinary-wide shift to a more holistic and inclusive framework has yet to be realised — whether from philological or archaeological points of departure. We therefore sought to contribute momentum to this shift by convening a conference of the same title in 2009 and assembling this edited volume of many of the papers delivered at that meeting. We feel this represents an important step towards focussing and stimulating a more sustained engagement with this theme, within archaeological discourse, textual studies, and hopefully beyond. Before outlining the contents of the volume we would like to briefly discuss the three key terms which bind the papers together, namely ‘writing’, ‘material’, and ‘practice’.