Session: #423

Content:

From its antiquarian origins, the study of inscriptions was long driven by philologists and historians whose primary goal was the extraction of textual data. In recent decades, more ‘archaeological’ perspectives have been successfully applied to inscribed monuments, addressing new questions and gaining new understandings of the social and cultural context of epigraphic material. These more holistic and theoretically informed approaches include, for instance, consideration of materiality, embodied engagement, object biography, and landscape context (at various scales). Hitherto, technical aspects of field epigraphy and documentation have to a large extent been dominated by the norms of Classical epigraphy, but these have varying degrees of applicability to other epigraphic traditions across the globe, including those which emerged in the non-urban, relatively small-scale societies on the northern and western periphery of the (former) Roman Empire. This is beginning to change as the new field of historical graphematics (the comparative study of historical writing systems) emerges, and initiatives such as the global EpiDocs community diversify the scope of their guidelines and schema to ensure common global standards for documenting epigraphic material in a broad range of scripts using TEI XML. The session provides an opportunity to look comparatively across different epigraphic traditions to examine what archaeology can contribute to the study of inscribed stone monuments. There will be a particular focus on the non-latinate writing systems of Celtic Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia (the ogham and runic alphabets), especially in the period 4th-11th cent CE. However, we welcome contributions from those applying archaeological perspectives to epigraphic material in other regions and from other periods, including non-monumental and portable inscriptions.

Session: #423

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