Reading :: Writing as Material Practice

Writing as Material Practice
Edited by Kathryn E. Piquette and Ruth D. Whitehouse

I ran into this 2013 collection in 2019. It's a free download, so I dropped it into Google Drive, and finally got to it -- er. maybe early 2021? It's a blur.

In any case, it grew out of a 2009 archaeology conference focused on understanding writing as material practice. I'm not an archaeologist by any means, but I'm very interested in understanding the material practice of writing as it developed, so I approached this collection as an interested outsider.

In Piquette and Whitehouse's "Introduction: Developing an approach to writing as material practice," they explain the book's focus: "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" (p.1). They add that "The term ‘material’ is conceptualised in variable ways in the volume’s chapters, but overall it refers to the stuff on which writing appears, and for additive techniques that which physically constitutes written marks" (p.3). 

The examples come from different places and times. For instance, in "The Twisting Paths of Recall: Khipu (Andean cord notation) as artifact," Frank Salomon discusses how "Khipu had a brief, spectacularly productive heyday as the official medium of the Inka state (established some time during the 15th century ce until 1532 ce)" (p.15) -- lucidly describing how they work, noting that they are actually pre-Inca (p.21) and possibly trace back to 1000 BCE (p.22), and describing their use into the colonial era at least up to 1600 CE (p.22). In fact, colonists first relied on them, then accepted them in courts, then required them (p.23). They are still used in some Andean areas. Salomon adds that "Inka administration itself relied on widespread khipu competence available throughout rural society, and not on a restricted clique of experts" -- but "I argue that khipus functioned as operational devices or simulators, and not as fixed texts" (p.30). 

What does that mean? In contemporary usage, "It acts as a visual image symbolizing all the data (knot) which will be resolved (unknotted) at the assembly. At the end of the meeting, the khipu is not re-cabled but rather carried to its home unbound, signaling the resolution of data" (p.32). And importantly, these khipu are not read alone, but together (p.35). 

Another interesting chapter was "Saving on Clay: The Linear B practice of cutting tablets" by Helena Tomas, in which the author investigates how clay tablets in the Aegean Bronze Age show signs of being cut down to save on materials. "Although many types of clay sealings were used for recording this administrative business, the clay tablet is the most prominent document type in Linear A and Linear B, whereas in Cretan Hieroglyphic it is present only in small quantities" (p.176). But they were not trying to save on clay per se: "since clay is not a particularly scarce substance

in Greece, saving was probably not the main motivation behind the practice of cutting tablets. A more likely aim appears to be a reduction of the size of tablets, and consequently of their weight, in order to economise on the space needed for their storage (for the maximum of one year, as numerous studies have shown)" (p.180). For most tablets, all we know for sure is that they were usually not stored on the ground floor. The exception tells us a lot: the "Archives Complex of Pylos, thanks to its placement on the ground floor. Here more than 1000 tablets were stored, probably on wooden shelves ... . The small size of the two archive-rooms and the construction of the shelves, possibly not fit for a heavy load, may have required strict removal of superfluous clay on tablets" (p.180). And: "The transport of tablets within the palace may have also required removal of unused clay. It has been suggested that tablets were transported in wicker baskets on top of which clay labels were pressed. These labels had no string that would attach them to the baskets, but were simply pressed against them while the clay was still moist, so traces of wickerwork are visible on their backs" (p.180). 

The author also notes incisions across some tablets and speculates that these were where tablets could be snapped in half (p.183). 

Other chapters are intriguing too. For instance, in "Straight, Crooked and Joined-up Writing: An early Mediterranean view," Alan Johnston considers "the extent to which writing surfaces, rather than other considerations, may be seen to have influenced the appearance of text in the early centuries of alphabetic writing in the Mediterranean world" (p.193). And in "Written Greek but Drawn Egyptian: Script changes in a bilingual dream papyrus," Stephen Kidd describes an account that switches between two writing systems: this case "helps one to begin to think of language in more material terms, and language-shifts not as purely cerebral events, but as events interconnected with physical practices and the memories of such practices. For the Greco-Egyptian of Ptolemaios’ day, the processes of writing Greek and Egyptian were highly different — while Greek was ‘written’, Egyptian was ‘painted’ — and so Ptolemaios, in his language shift, was not just choosing between two different languages, but between what were usually two very different practices of writing" (p.245). 

Again, I'm no archaeologist, so I can't provide a good evaluation of this work. But the collection makes fascinating reading. If you are also interested in the materiality of writing, definitely take a look.