McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research annual report 2018-19

Research Highlights
Contexts of and Relations between Early
Writing Systems (CREWS)
Philip J. Boyes & Philippa M. Steele
The CREWS project (Contexts of and Relations between
Early Writing Systems) organized a major international
conference in March 2019 on the theme of ‘Exploring the
Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Systems’. This
meeting pushed the boundaries of traditional approaches
to the study of writing by bringing together 24 speakers
working on writing practices from a very wide range of
different viewpoints: from social archaeology, anthropology,
cognitive archaeology and linguistics to studies of
materiality, iconography, agency, identity and cultural
memory. The resulting discussion identified important areas
of common ground between these different disciplinary
approaches, applicable to (mostly pre-modern) writing
systems across the world, from the Americas to the Far East,
and makes a major contribution to the CREWS research
agenda to overturn and rethink the way we study writing
systems and practices.
B2C – Beasts to Craft
Matthew Collins
The ERC Advanced award Beasts to Craft (B2C), a project to
explore the materiality of parchment as a record of animal
husbandry and craft skill, kicked off with a meeting in the
Henry Wellcome Building and was combined with a class
given by the B2C staff to undergraduate and MPhil students
in the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College.
This was followed by a Workshop, ‘Biocodicology: The
parchment record and the biology of the book’, hosted
by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington (DC) in
March, where a small group of 30 researchers drawn from
three continents and nine countries met to discuss how to
integrate scientific and historical research on parchment
with materiality and conservation.
As an introduction to the prospects of the project, the team
prepared a joint article, ‘So you want to do biocodicology?
A field guide to the biological analysis of parchment’, which
was published in Heritage Science. Project administrator Alizon
Holland joined the Department of Archaeology in January,
and other members of the team will be joining next year.
https://sites.google.com/palaeome.org/ercb2c/
Funding: European Union’s EU Framework Programme for Research
and Innovation Horizon 2020.
The proceedings will be published (with open access)
with Oxbow Books, but in the meantime many of the
presentations are available to watch on the CREWS YouTube
channel:
https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/social-and-culturalcontexts-of-writing/
The conference was generously sponsored by the European Research
Council, which funds the CREWS project (Horizon 2020 grant no.
677758).
Emma Nichols (Cambridge University Library)
demonstrates parchment sampling to staff and students
at the B2C kick-off meeting.
Experimental
parchment samples
prepared by Jiri
Vnoucek, Det
Kongelige Bibliotek,
Copenhagen.
Archaeology at Cambridge 2018–2019 25