Archaeology, writing tablets and literacy in roman britain

John Pearce

The excavation of large numbers of wooden writing tablets at Vindolanda has changed radically our view of literacy and the use of documents in Roman Britain and beyond. Their discovery, as well as that of assemblages of lead 'curse tablets', have made Britannia the most prolific source of Latin documents in the western empire. The Vindolanda tablets have obliged us to acknowledge the importance of the ink writing tablet, previously a historical footnote, as a documentary medium and have allowed the detailed investigation of the habits of literacy in a single military community. Approaches to the Vindolanda tablets and to other documents have however been predominantly text-oriented. It is the argument of this

article that we may gain further insights into both the literacy of the province and the interpretation of individual groups of texts from the study of the archaeological context in which wooden tablets and analogous documents have been found. Archaeological context is increasingly valued in the study of groups of documents (Bagnall, 1995, p. 52), but the nature and scope of its potential contribution remain somewhat unclear. After outlining the current characterization of literacy in Roman Britain, the article therefore discusses the general potential of this form of evidence, as well as the associated problems, drawing illustrations from other parts of the Roman world. The evidence from Roman Britain is then re-examined

Galha, 61, 2004, p. 1-192

© CNRS EDITIONS, Paris, 2004