The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices

About the Author: Philip J. Boyes is a research associate at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, working on the social context of writing at Ugarit as part of The Crews Project. He has previously worked on the archaeology of the east Mediterranean and Levant in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages.
About the Author: Philippa M. Steele Is The Director Of The Crews Project, A Senior Research Associate At The Faculty Of Classics, Cambridge, And A Senior Research Fellow Of Magdalene College. Having Previously Been Awarded A British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship And The Evans Pritchard Lectureship At All Souls College, Oxford, She Has Published Widely On Ancient Languages And Writing Systems With A Particular Focus On Cyprus And The Aegean.
About the Author: Natalia Elvira Astoreca developed her PhD thesis as a member of the CREWS Project. Before coming to the University of Cambridge, she studied at Leiden University and the Autonomous University of Madrid. Her research is focused on the interactions between language and script, especially in the case of early alphabetic writing in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.
Writing is not just a set of systems for transcribing language and communicating meaning, but an important element of human practice, deeply embedded in the cultures where it is present and fundamentally interconnected with all other aspects of human life. The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices explores these relationships in a number of different cultural contexts and from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeological, anthropological and linguistic. It offers new ways of approaching the study of writing and integrating it into wider debates and discussions about culture, history and archaeology.