Conference held Thursday 14th – Saturday 16th March 2019.
Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge
Abstracts are available to view here.
Several of these papers are available as recordings on the CREWS YouTube channel, or by clicking on the direct links in their titles below.
Thursday 14th
Writing and Culture
11.05 Christopher Rollston – Scribes, Seal Makers, Bureaucrats, Masons, and the Military Brass: The Social Context of Writing in the Iron Age Southern Levant
11.50 Theo Nash – Cultures of Writing: The Invention and Re-Invention of Greek Writing in Context
Afternoon – Literacy, Learning and Writing in Society
2.00 Aurélie Névot – How to decrypt the secret writings of the Masters of psalmody (Yunnan, China)? Words beyond writings
2.45 Cécile Guillaume-Pey – A Script ‘good to drink’. Invention of an alphabet and Emergence of a Religious Movement among the Sora (central India)
3.30 Break
4.00 Piers Kelly – Writing systems invented by non-literates and what they tell us
4.45 Katherine Forsyth – Literacy beyond the limes: the social and cultural contexts of ogham and Pictish symbol writing
Friday 15th
Archaeologies of Writing
9.00 Philip Boyes – The Social Archaeology of Writing Systems
9.45 Karenleigh Overmann – A Cognitive Archaeology of Writing: Concepts, Models, Goals
10.30 Break
Materiality and Artefacts
11.00 Nancy Highcock – The Afterlives of Inscribed Commemorative Objects: the transformation of personal memory in Mesopotamian temple contexts
11.45 Marie-Lousie Nosch & Agata Ulanowska – Materiality of the Cretan Hieroglyphic Script
12.30 Lunch
Writing for Display
2.00 Christian Prager – Visual-Iconographic Dimension of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: Meanings Beyond the Surface
2.45 Sophie Heier – The visibility of runic writing and its relation to Viking Age society
3.30 Break
4.00 Alex West – Why did people in medieval Java use so many different scripts?
4.45 Claus Jurman – Towards socio-graphematics: Learning and adopting lapidary script(s) in the multilingual/multi-ethnic environment of Egypt during the 8th century BCE
Saturday 16th
Agency and Personhood
9.00 Marcia-Anne Dobres – An Outsider’s Musings on the Meaningful and Embodied Practice, Technology, and Social Agency of (Some) Early Writing Systems
9.45 James Whitley – Why με? Personhood and agency in Greek inscriptions (800-550 BCE).
10.30 Break
Writing and elite culture
11.00 Kathryn Hudson & John S. Henderson – Script, Image, and Elite Culture in the Maya World: A Southeastern Perspective
11.45 Sarah Finlayson – Writing and elite status in the Bronze Age Aegean
12.30 Lunch
Writing and Identity
2.00 Katherine McDonald – Connectivity and competition: alphabets as identities in Italy
2.45 Natalia Elvira Astoreca – Names and authorship in the beginnings of Greek alphabetic writing
3.30 Olga Tribulato & Valentina Mignosa – A graphic sign of identity? History and meaning of an arrow-shaped alpha
Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a European Research Council (ERC) funded project hosted at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. This project has received funding from the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758).
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