"... [the Phaistos disk] has been a millstone round my neck for
decades..." -- John Chadwick, co-decipherer of Linear B
Hardly a month goes by where there is not an announcement of a new archaeological discovery that claims to show evidence of a previously unknown form of writing. Often the find will be a piece of pottery with a few ambiguous scratch marks on it, but sometimes more elaborate pieces are found, such as the recently announced tablets from Jiroft. Obviously the first question that must be asked of such finds is whether they are genuine, but once one gets beyond this initial due diligence there are two issues that must be addressed.
The first issue is whether it is even writing. Writing is a conventionalized set of marks used to record language, and not every symbology, no matter how complex, is writing.
Once it is established that the system must probably have been writing, the next question is whether it can be deciphered, and what counts as a real decipherment. Some corpora, including Easter Island rongorongo, the Phaistos disk, and Indus Valley inscriptions have seen many claimed decipherments, most of which seem hardly likely to be verified.
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers with a variety of backgrounds including archaeology/epigraphy, comparative history, Indology and computational linguistics, with a common interest in scripts and writing systems. We want to address the following questions, with reference to concrete examples:
