11.4: About the Past, Constituting the Past

In contrast to notions of the inscribed object as something that ‘is written’ or constitutes a ‘written source’ which tell us about the past, early graphical expression is seen here as meaningfully constituted through the material actions of past individuals and as products of those actions. A mark or sign is thus seen as having efficacy in the past rather than just providing evidence about it (see Moreland 2006). For its theoretical and methodological bases, this study is informed by structuration, a practice theory which situates the agency of the knowledgeable individual in a mutually constituting relationship with social structures (e.g. Giddens 1984). According to this duality, the focus on choice requires consideration of the individual actor or technician, but always in terms of the ways in which individual choice was informed by, and re-informed, related social structures (cf. Meskell 2004: 53). Criticism has been levelled at what has been perceived, on the one hand, as structuration’s over-individualising view on past actors, or on the other hand, as offering a grand unitary account where action overemphasises collectives and institutions, although these critiques have been challenged (Gardner 2007; 2008). Collective representations consist of the results of individual decisions to participate in the reproduction of certain past choices. Thus, the personal is necessarily social, the individual body forever part of the body politic, and the operational gestures of a single technician’s hands, in making an inscribed label for example, are therefore tied to — though not totally determined by — collective representations (see Dobres 2000: 216). Whether episodes of action relate to a single and/or multiple individuals is not always archaeologically visible. Nevertheless, I hope the analysis of material patterning among the object types examined here gives some idea of the social structures reproduced or renegotiated across time-space through technological choice and related scribal and semantic intention, thus contributing to a more holistic and synchronically-derived understanding of written meanings (cf. Baines 2008: 842; see also Piquette 2013).