Archaeology is, by its nature, a rather expansionist discipline. In gathering the disparate fragments of evidence with which we seek to reconstruct the past, we find ourselves venturing into everything from history to biological science. The field is notorious for appropriating and incorporating into itself the theory and methodology of other disciplines: ‘archaeological theory’ is a hodgepodge of sociology, philosophy, cultural studies and more, very little of which was first created with archaeology in mind. As an archaeologist, it can at times feel like nothing is beyond its scope, that everything can and should be folded into its holistic attempt to reconstruct the past.2
It’s curious, then, how little archaeology has had to say about writing. We’re accustomed to archaeologists using metaphors of reading and literacy to explain people’s engagement with other aspects of the social and material world – ‘reading the past’, ‘reading archaeological landscapes’, ‘writing the body’ and so on (Hodder and Hutson 2003; Yamin and Metheny 1996; Meskell 2000 respectively). Occasionally there
1 This chapter comprises an exploratory first outing of ideas that is developed in more detail in Boyes (2021), which is the end-product of the research project within which this work was carried out. My research, like this volume as a whole, is part of the CREWS Project. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758). I am grateful to those who commented on the suggestions offered in this paper when it was delivered in March 2019, and especially to Philippa Steele for reading draft versions of this and the related chapters in the larger monograph. Any errors are, as ever, my own.
2 This is, I’m aware, a rather ‘maximalist’ understanding of what archaeology is; for others, it might be seen as a more specific, limited field specifically focused on dealing with material remains. As far as I’m concerned, while materiality is at the heart of archaeology, the interpretation of those remains can only be achieved by drawing upon a full range of available material, and thus archaeological disciplinary expansionism is mandated.
are discussions about methodologies for integrating written sources with the material culture, about the nature and theory of textual or historic archaeology. These are not the same as an archaeology of writing, however. When it comes to writing as a type of human practice, a field of creativity and interpretation that spans material and immaterial culture, archaeologists have seemed reluctant to get involved. When a clay tablet or inscribed stone stele is unearthed, archaeologists tend to wash their hands of it and send it to specialist epigraphers, palaeographers and philologists. Its objectness falls away and it becomes a ‘text’ or ‘inscription’, defined by the writing it bears. Its other characteristics – its archaeological context, material features, methods of production, use and functions, interpretations by various people and groups, and so on, have traditionally been relegated to secondary concerns, if they have been considered at all (see also Tsouparopoulou 2016). In many traditional publications, the object that bore an inscription was not even mentioned or illustrated – only the writing was deemed worthy of publication.
This is something of a simplification, and things have been changing. In particular, the notion of materiality has been growing in prominence within epigraphic studies for several years now.3 By this is meant such things as the physical nature of the object upon which the writing is found – its size, composition, likelihood to degrade or survive – the methods by which the writing is produced. This is very welcome, but even among materially-minded epigraphers terms like ‘text vehicle’ or ‘material support’ remain widespread, encapsulating and ingraining an assumption that the writing is in some way primary and the object itself exists mainly to substantiate. There has been extremely useful work done on production processes like the way signs were inscribed or the manufacture of writing surfaces, but it’s less common to see significant engagement with other aspects of the material biographies of inscribed objects, including how they relate to the wider network of material culture and practice within a society.
Often, too little attention is given to the roles these objects played, how people interacted with them beyond the act of inscribing a text, and how the fact of their inscription affected these things. In short, while researchers into writing are increasingly aware that texts are not free-floating abstract lexical entities but are features of objects that have materiality, in many cases we continue to decontextualise these objects, to separate them off from wider society and culture – in short, from the archaeological.
This chapter aims to do two things: first, to outline a theoretical framework for reintegrating the epigraphic with the archaeological and exploring the socio-cultural context of writing practices and writing systems, and secondly to explore some of the practical challenges in putting such a methodology into effect in a specific case-study, namely my research focus of Late Bronze Age Ugarit.
3 The literature on this is vast and growing, but see, for example, Eidem (2002); Pearce (2010), Taylor (2011); Ferrara (2012); contributions to Piquette and Whitehouse (2013b); Ellison (2015), Balke and Tsouparopoulou (2016) all with extensive further bibliography.
Writing as social practice
It is fundamental to my approach here that writing is a human practice embedded in social and cultural relations in exactly the same way that making and using pottery, building and occupying houses, producing and consuming food and any other form of productive behaviour are. As such, it seems to me that any archaeology of writing must be a social archaeology and that we can use the questions and methodologies long established within this sub-discipline as a template for how we should approach writing systems.
Looking through publications on social archaeology with a view to this sort of adaptation, the breadth of topics and approaches can initially be daunting. Just one companion to the field – Lynn Meskell and Robert Preucel’s (2004) A Companion to Social Archaeology – includes in its contents page such disparate topics as embodied subjectivity, gender, sexuality, age, colonialism, the social significance of material culture;
ideology, power and consumption; space and landscape; household production;
diaspora and identity; politics and the often contested relationship between archaeology and indigenous understandings of the past. We might easily add others of our own – matters such as food practices, religion and ritual, the archaeology of social change, and more. Some of these topics, such as gender, ethnicity and other forms of identity, are of obvious relevance to writing systems; many others are almost never encountered in scholarly discussions of the subject. It is not possible here to go through each in turn and demonstrate their relevance to the world of writing practices. Many are discussed in Boyes (2021). But in my view there isn’t a single branch of social archaeology that writing practices are not entangled with in some way. From food preparation to body-modification, identity to politics, writing practices – by virtue of the fact that they are social practices – are intertwined with every other part of human social life.
They cannot be anything else.
This brings us to the matter of theoretical frameworks. The networked, mutually- entangled view of human practice which I have alluded to is, of course, drawn from a particular theoretical understanding of practice and its relationship to material culture and human agency. More generally, it’s obvious that if our premise is that the social context of writing is inextricably entangled with the whole vast and messy bundle of human behaviour and culture, then we’re going to need some sort of theoretical or methodological apparatus to structure and make sense of this rapidly-expanding field of enquiry.
As described in the Introduction to this volume, the understanding of practice and its relationship to human society which I follow here is derived from Giddens and Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1977; 1990; Giddens 1984; see also Englehardt 2013b). Bourdieu, through his idea of habitus, and Giddens, with his notion of structuration, explored how human agency was shaped by, enabled by, or reacted against pre-existing structures of thought, social organisation and expected behaviours.4 These new practices then served to reproduce or alter those structures in an endless cycle.
4 An exhaustive bibliography of agency would be impossible here but see, for example, Dobres and Robb (2005), Knappett and Malafouris (2008), Englehardt (2013a), Robb (2010).
This cyclical churn of practice, social structure and agency involves more than just human actors, as more recent work has increasingly emphasised (Knappett and Malafouris 2008; Hodder 2012). A number of scholars have argued persuasively for the idea that agency exists in the relationships between any and all social entities, whether human, animal or even inanimate objects. It has become common to talk about the ‘agency of things’ – the way material culture enforces, allows, limits, denies and affords particular forms of behaviour. As Malafouris puts it (2008, 22, emphasis original), ‘[W]hile agency and intentionality may not be properties of things, they are not properties of humans either: they are the properties of material engagement, that is, of the grey zone where brain, body and culture conflate.’ He offers the example of wheelmade pottery, which is the result of an interaction between human being, potter’s wheel and the clay itself, each exerting a certain measure of influence on the final form.
Emerging from this relational approach is a view of culture, society and practice which is fundamentally network-based – everything is tied to multiple other entities;
nothing is single, discrete and bounded (Latour 2005; Knappett 2008; Hodder 2012). In short, everything is, to use Hodder’s term, entangled.5 The links in this vast and complex mesh are fraught with varying measures and forms of agency. They have broader utility too: we’re accustomed to speaking of ‘writing systems’ or ‘traditions’ as if they’re relatively discrete entities in their own rights, readily separable from their rivals.
Often, however, it makes much more sense to think in terms of meshes of practices that interlink to differing degrees, with some clustered much more closely together as similar but none entirely alike, and others more distantly connected but nevertheless not entirely distinct separate ‘systems’. These networks have also proven a productive way of thinking about the pathways along which people and objects disseminate writing practices, scholarly materials and related knowledge (Robson 2014; 2019).
Does this mean that when we look into writing practices we also need to look at everything else? And is this not an impractically vast undertaking? Well, yes, I think we do: as I said at the outset, archaeology is an expansionist discipline and to gain a proper understanding of how something works within a society and culture, there is ultimately a necessity to cast our nets as wide as possible and approach the matter as holistically as we can, both in terms of the questions we ask and the evidence we take into account. Practically, however, there are certain factors which prevent this becoming an ever-expanding and unmanageable task. Time, funding and the limits of our own abilities all come into play: of course we must draw the line somewhere and that will depend on personal judgement and the nature of a specific case. But there are also the limitations of the evidence, as we will see when we go on to discuss the case of Ugarit. Particularly for earlier periods or societies where available information is limited, certain questions will be very difficult to get traction on; the expansion of our remit becomes limited by the extent to which published data allows us to say
5 For another approach to the idea of entanglement in the archaeology of writing, see Tsouparopoulou (forthcoming).
relevant and useful things. I’m not proposing that we must consider everything in depth, only that we consider as much as we can and not draw artificial boundaries separating one aspect of social or cultural life off from others.
I want to conclude this theoretical overview with a few words on the subject of
‘writing systems’. This term is widely used, not least in the name of the CREWS Project and the titles of both the original oral version of this chapter and the conference at which it was presented. However, I have found myself increasingly uneasy with it, since it seems to sit uncomfortably within the theoretical framework I’ve articulated here. The idea of a ‘writing system’ both reifies a particular bundle of practices as a coherent, distinct, named entity – ‘cuneiform’ or ‘Linear B’ or whatever – while also depersonalising those practices into a rather machine-like and abstract system. This owes much to the Saussurean roots of modern linguistics (see, for instance, Coulmas 2003, esp. ch. 1) but is in tension with the view of practice I have espoused here, whose theoretical background lies in an attempt to move beyond the depersonalised, agency-less world of Saussurean structuralism. Where constant reproduction and flux are the order of the day, where everything is entangled with everything else, no writing practices can really be parcelled off into convenient, discrete entities or
‘systems’. This is something I began to articulate at the previous CREWS conference when I discussed the position of the so-called short cuneiform alphabet relative to the
‘long alphabet’, linear alphabetic writing and logosyllabic cuneiform (Boyes 2019b). It became clear to me that not only were several of the examples of ‘short alphabetic’
writing at least as different from each other as they were from the ‘long alphabet’, but also many aspects of their use and context fitted far more closely with linear alphabetic writing practices than with other examples of the alphabetic cuneiform
‘writing system’. In other words, we were not dealing with a set of writing systems and sub-systems, but with a single extended mesh of writing practices including various manifestations of linear alphabetic, alphabetic cuneiform and logosyllabic cuneiform writing practices. Within this we could identify clusters of similar practices but none were entirely alike, nor entirely distinct from other ‘systems’.
I’m not trying to deny that, from a linguistic perspective, it can be convenient to talk about ‘writing systems’ in the sense that the symbolic meaning of signs and their relationship to each other must be in some sense systematised for them to function in communicating meaning across a group of users. From a socio-cultural point of view, however, ‘writing systems’ can have the arbitrary and dehumanised air of the various social systems and subsystems posited by systems theorists in the functionalist archaeology of the mid-twentieth century, or the autonomous ‘cultures’
that came before. Just as ‘cultures’ or ‘societies’ themselves have long been seen as problematic conceptual shorthands for a dizzying array of practices, material culture traditions, beliefs and identities which never entirely map on to each other, so we must move beyond ‘writing systems’ as an analytical tool. For these reasons, I think it is prudent, at least in social-contextual discussions such as this, to reframe the discussion around writing practices.
Towards a method
If society is entangled, relational and held together by interactions of agency, then our method for approaching the archaeology of writing must also be relational and agency-based. We need to explore how the inscribed object, and/or the writing practices involved in its production, use and reception are enmeshed into other parts of social life and practice, but not in a way that reduces these links to abstract, mechanistically interacting systems and subsystems. We need to think about how agency is exerted in each case, and when it comes to conscious actors, to think about how their choices and decisions are constrained, enabled, suggested, limited, prevented and so on both by the agency of others and by existing social structures or habitus. Four strands of analysis are necessary, which are detailed below. By necessity, these are presented one by one, which can give the impression that they should be sequential, moving ever outwards from the object to more overarching analyses of its place in society. I want to stress that in practice, however, there is not a linear progression from one to the next. These strands must be braided together to form a thorough analysis.
The first form of analysis is to establish clearly the physical characteristics of the object itself. This is what is generally done under the rubric of epigraphic materiality research: we need to define features such as nature of object, size, weight, fabric.
Crucially, we shouldn’t just direct our attention to the writing itself. If we are dealing with an inscribed vessel, for example, it is at least as important to conduct residue analysis and try to determine its contents as it is to consider what went into the paint used to write the text. This information should all be included – and ideally illustrated – in eventual publication; there shouldn’t be an artificial divide between text and object. So far, so basic; most good epigraphic work is probably doing this as a matter of course.
Secondly, we need to think about the object’s immediate physical context and to begin to investigate its relationships with other material culture and with people.
Again, what I’m calling for here will not blow any minds through exotic novelty: we must consider where the object was found, its stratigraphy and how that deposit was formed: was it a primary or secondary deposit?6 Is it likely to reflect where and how the object was used during its ‘life’ or was it placed there as an act of disposal (e.g. through dedication or discard). In addition, we must not draw the line at inscribed objects: it’s critically important that we pay just as much attention to the non-inscribed material culture, since this is the only way we can begin to understand the relationships these objects had between each other and with the people who produced, used, traded, observed, coveted, ignored and discarded them. In other words, we must approach inscribed objects as part of the general archaeological assemblage, no differently.
Thirdly, we can look for meanings, for the heterogeneous exertions of agency by and on the objects we are interested in. We can explore the links between objects and
6 That is, material found more or less where it was initially fell or was placed versus material secondarily brought there through natural or human processes.
the other material culture with which they are immediately associated, and begin to consider the social factors such as norms, ideologies and beliefs that came into play in these practices. Various frameworks can aid us in this, guide us as we follow the endless network of connections. Robb, for example, advocates a threefold schema of possible meanings: structural meanings derived from the habitus and general beliefs about how the world works; generic meanings based on the particular field of action an object was part of, and contextual meanings based on how these ideas
the other material culture with which they are immediately associated, and begin to consider the social factors such as norms, ideologies and beliefs that came into play in these practices. Various frameworks can aid us in this, guide us as we follow the endless network of connections. Robb, for example, advocates a threefold schema of possible meanings: structural meanings derived from the habitus and general beliefs about how the world works; generic meanings based on the particular field of action an object was part of, and contextual meanings based on how these ideas