Ebook: Agency in Ancient Writing

Introduction: individual intentionality, social structure, and material agency in early writing and emerging script technologies / Joshua Englehardt and Dimitri Nakassis -- The mediated image: reflections on semasiographic notation in the ancient Americas / Margaret A. Jackson -- Bureaucratic backlashes: bureaucrats as agents of socioeconomic change in proto-historic Mesopotamia / Clemens Reichel -- Are writing systems intelligently designed? / Adam D. Smith -- Agency in death: early Egyptian writing from mortuary contexts / Laurel Bestock -- Reembodying identity: seals and seal impressions as agents of social change on late prepalatial Crete / Emily S.K. Anderson -- Performance, presence, and genre in Maya hieroglyphs: a case study in the agency of writing / Michael D. Carrasco -- Contingency and innovation in native transcriptions of encrypted cuneiform (ud.gal.nun) / J. Cale Johnson and Adam Johnson -- Structuration of the conjuncture: agency in classic Maya iconography and texts / Joshua Englehardt -- Inscriptions from Zhongshan: Chinese texts and the archaeology of agency / Wang Haicheng -- Structuration and the state in Mycenaean Greece / Dimitri Nakassis -- Epilogue: agency and writing / Ruth D. Whitehouse