Writing as Material Practice Substance, surface and medium Edited by Kathryn E. Piquette and Ruth D. Whitehouse Writing as Material Practice: Substance, surface and medium Edited by Kathryn E. Piquette and Ruth D. Whitehouse ]u[ ubiquity press London Published by Ubiquity Press Ltd. Gordon House 29 Gordon Square London WC1H 0PP www.ubiquitypress.com Text © The Authors 2013 First published 2013 Front Cover Illustrations: Top row (from left to right): Flouda (Chapter 8): Mavrospelio ring made of gold. Courtesy Heraklion Archaelogical Museum; Pye (Chapter 16): A Greek and Latin lexicon (1738). Photograph Nick Balaam; Pye (Chapter 16): A silver decadrachm of Syracuse (5th century BC). © Trustees of the British Museum. Middle row (from left to right): Piquette (Chapter 11): A wooden label. Photograph Kathryn E. Piquette, courtesy Ashmolean Museum; Flouda (Chapter 8): Ceramic conical cup. Courtesy Heraklion Archaelogical Museum; Salomon (Chapter 2): Wrapped sticks, Peabody Museum, Harvard. Photograph courtesy of William Conklin. Bottom row (from left to right): Flouda (Chapter 8): Linear A clay tablet. Courtesy Heraklion Archaelogical Museum; Johnston (Chapter 10): Inscribed clay ball. Courtesy of Persepolis Fortification Archive Project, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago; Kidd (Chapter 12): P.Cairo 30961 recto. Photograph Ahmed Amin, Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Back Cover Illustration: Salomon (Chapter 2): 1590 de Murúa manuscript (de Murúa 2004: 124 verso) Printed in the UK by Lightning Source Ltd. ISBN (hardback): 978-1-909188-24-2 ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-909188-25-9 ISBN (PDF): 978-1-909188-26-6 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bai This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This licence allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Suggested citation: Piquette, K. E. and Whitehouse, R. D. (eds.) 2013 Writing as Material Practice: Substance, surface and medium. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bai To read the online open access version of this book, either visit http:dx.doi.org/10.5334/bai or scan this QR code with your mobile device: Contents Acknowledgements iii Contributors v Abstracts ix Chapter 1. Introduction: Developing an approach to writing as material practice (Kathryn E. Piquette and Ruth D. Whitehouse) 1 Chapter 2. The Twisting Paths of Recall: Khipu (Andean cord notation) as artifact (Frank Salomon) 15 Chapter 3. Writing as Material Technology: Orientation within landscapes of the Classic Maya world (Sarah E. Jackson) 45 Chapter 4. Writing (and Reading) as Material Practice: The world of cuneiform culture as an arena for investigation (Roger Matthews) 65 Chapter 5. Re-writing the Script: Decoding the textual experience in the Bronze Age Levant (c.2000–1150 bc) (Rachael Thyrza Sparks) 75 Chapter 6. The Function and Meaning of Writing in the Prehistoric Aegean: Some reflections on the social and symbolic significance of writing from a material perspective (Helène Whittaker) 105 Chapter 7. Form Follows Function: Writing and its supports in the Aegean Bronze Age (Sarah Finlayson) 123 Chapter 8. Materiality of Minoan Writing: Modes of display and perception (Georgia Flouda) 143 Chapter 9. Saving on Clay: The Linear B practice of cutting tablets (Helena Tomas) 175 Chapter 10. Straight, Crooked and Joined-up Writing: An early Mediterranean view (Alan Johnston) 193 Chapter 11. “It Is Written”?: Making, remaking and unmaking early ‘writing’ in the lower Nile Valley (Kathryn E. Piquette) 213 Chapter 12. Written Greek but Drawn Egyptian: Script changes in a bilingual dream papyrus (Stephen Kidd) 239 ii Writing as Material Practice Chapter 13. The Other Writing: Iconic literacy and Situla Art in pre-Roman Veneto (Italy) (Elisa Perego) 253 Chapter 14. ‘Tombstones’ in the North Italian Iron Age: Careless writers or athletic readers? (Ruth D. Whitehouse) 271 Chapter 15. Different Times, Different Materials and Different Purposes: Writing on objects at the Grand Arcade site in Cambridge (Craig Cessford) 289 Chapter 16. Writing Conservation: The impact of text on conservation decisions and practice (Elizabeth Pye) 319 Chapter 17. Epilogue (John Bennet) 335 Acknowledgements This volume grew out of a conference of the same title, held at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London in May 2009. The conference was the winner of the conference com- petition held each year by the Institute of Archaeology and we are very grateful to the Institute for the grant of £2000 that provided our basic funding. The conference was a very lively, stimulating and enjoyable occasion and we would like to thank all those who gave papers and contributed to discussions. Over the course of three days, papers addressed the theme of writing as material practice from the perspectives of Archaeology, Anthropology, Classics, Communication Arts, Conservation, Design, Digital Humanities, Education, History of the Book, and Information Studies. In addition to several UK institutions, international institutions in Australia, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, and the US were also represented. We are particularly grateful to Jonathan Taylor, British Museum Assistant Keeper of Cuneiform Collections, and Paul Antonio, professional freelance calligrapher, both of whom brought materiality onto the conference floor, with their workshops on cuneiform and Egyptian scripts, respectively. We would also like to thank the conference volunteers (Sarah Doherty, Sarah Foster, Gabriel Moshenska, Massimiliano Pinarello, Daniela Rosenow, and Jenny Wexler) whose help with organising everything, from refreshments to furniture moving and organisation of PowerPoint presentations, made the conference run so smoothly. The transformation of conference papers into a published volume has proved more complex and taken longer than we had originally planned. We are grateful to all our contributors for the patience and good humour with which they have responded to the delays and our frequent requests for editorial changes and additional information. We would like to thank Brian Hole, Tim Wakeford and Paige MacKay at Ubiquity Press for their help and co-operation in bringing the volume to successful fruition. Having taken on publication of the book at a late stage, they also took on our editorial commitment to publish within the timeframe for the REF (Research Excellence Framework) currently dominating research in UK universities, that is the end of the calendar year 2013. We greatly appreciate their understanding and assistance in meeting this goal. Support during the later phases of volume preparation was also provided by the Excellence Cluster TOPOI in association with the Freie Universität Berlin. Finally, we would like to thank our respective partners, Andrew Gardner and John Wilkins, for their patience and tolerance — and occasional technical assistance — during the long gestation of this project. Kathryn E. Piquette, Ruth D. Whitehouse 25 November 2013 Contributors John Bennet is Professor of Aegean Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. His research interests include early scripts and administrative systems, the integration of textual and archaeological data, and the late prehistoric complex societies of the Aegean (Crete and mainland Greece), where he has also carried out fieldwork. He has pub- lished on Aegean administration and scripts as well as co-editing, with John Baines and Stephen Houston, a more general collection of papers on scripts: The Disappearance of Writing Systems: Perspectives on literacy and communication (2008). He is currently working on A Short History of the Minoans. Craig Cessford is a Senior Project Officer with the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, part of the Division of Archaeology of the University of Cambridge, where he specialises in medi- eval and later urban archaeology and has directed excavations at the Grand Arcade and Old Divinity School sites. He has worked in both academic and developer-funded archaeology for over 20 years and has published over 100 book chapters and journal articles including Between Broad Street and the Great Ouse: Waterfront archaeology in Ely (2006), several chapters in the Çatalhöyük monograph series and papers in American Antiquity, Antiquity, Archaeological Journal, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Journal of Field Archaeology, and Oxford Journal of Archaeology. Sarah Finlayson is a PhD student in the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield. She is currently writing up her doctoral thesis, A Comparative Study of the Archaeology of Writing in the Bronze Age Aegean. Her research interests lie in the broad landscape of writing practices in the Bronze Age Aegean; unpicking the complex and changing relationships between script- based writing, seal use and other marking practices such as potmarks and mason’s marks, and in understanding what motivates both their continuity and change. Forthcoming papers include a discussion of how best to define writing in this period, and an overview of where writing was produced or consumed and its significance. Georgia Flouda is a Curator at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, where she is involved in the redisplay of the Minoan Collection. She has a PhD from the University