LAUSR

The last 25 years have seen a dramatic expansion in the production and popular reception of graffiti. In the context of this twenty-first century (re)discovery, Scribbling Through History provides a vital reminder of graffiti’s deeper history as an enduring human activity. The volume originates from a conference held in Oxford in 2013, aimed at bringing together ‘specialists working on graffiti in as many different cultures as possible’ (p. 4) so that commonalities and differences of definition, method and theory might be constructively discussed and scrutinised. In large part the resulting compilation fulfils this impetus, despite a perceptible geographic and disciplinary focus on inscriptions of the Ancient or Classical World. There is a compelling diversity of social, religious and political contexts and motivating factors explored across the book’s 12 case studies. The editors open the volume by outlining the complexities of graffiti, both as a subject of enquiry and as a burgeoning field of interdisciplinary study. They identify instructive aspects of previous research which frame the direction of the present title, without attempting to set or resolve questions of categorization. Thankfully, their expansive tone liberates the contributing authors from becoming absorbed in what graffiti is and they are instead able to demonstrate what graffiti does and how it works. Although the book generally eschews prescriptive definitions, from the outset graffiti is foregrounded as an action or situated event and, more or less implicitly, as a practice of writing. This position ensures graffiti is firmly instated within epigraphic and classical studies, but to some extent overshadows the treatment of graffiti as artefact. Following the introduction, chapters are grouped thematically into sections, according to the physical context or material surface within which inscriptions operate. As such, there is Section 1 Graffiti in the Landscape; Section 2 Graffiti and the Wall; and Section 3 Graffiti and the Written Page. Ostensibly, this structure reflects an attunement to the relationships forged between the writer/maker and the site or socio-cultural setting of inscription activity. Hence graffiti is variously construed as a statement and an action: a process of identity formation and negotiation; a performance of place-making, devotion or commemoration, an act of pilgrimage, protest, resistance and belonging. Many of the chapters explore how graffiti reactivates surface and space, forming a dialogical and dynamic interface in which past and present intersect and entangle through the reading/writing and seeing/drawing experience. Section 1 incorporates case studies in which graffiti is inscribed into open sites and specific geological landscapes, thereby addressing the capacity of mark-making to transform, augment and mediate spheres of the natural and cultural environment. Chloé Ragazzoli begins the series with an analysis of the content and spatial distribution of graffiti from a tomb at Deir el-Bahari, Ancient Egypt. She describes how a diverse suite of votive inscriptions, names, satire and erotica correspond to a distinct social milieu of scribes who used graffiti to enact their participation in a professional community. In chapter 2, Alain Delattre details specific instances of graffiti activity to trace the presence of individual Christian clerics and pilgrims living and travelling through the Theban Mountain during the sixth–eighth centuries. Noting how particular individuals returned and renewed their ‘signature’, Delattre signals the potential of graffiti as a ritualized exercise of place-making, as well as a source of biography for the researcher in the present. In chapter 3, Ömür Harmansa̧h compares the rock monuments and graffiti of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Anatolia. While he proposes that they constitute distinct inscription ontologies, he explains how they each contribute to the making and unmaking of territory and self and sacred geographies. In the chapter that follows, Michael Macdonald provides a fascinating investigation of the relationship between writing and literacy in ancient Arabia, describing the individual and clustered graffiti of two desert communities: Safaitic scripts made by nomads living in an oral or ‘non-literate society’ (within which word-of-mouth and memory are the dominant mode of communication); and the texts produced by settled Nabateans, for whom reading and writing was essential to the functioning of their ‘literate society’. Closing this section, Christiane Gruber presents a contemporary case study from Istanbul’s Gezi Park, tracing the semantic origins of specific slogans and images and strategies of ‘rhetorical conflict’. She reveals how Gezi graffiti, through its ‘shared locus’ and generative unfolding, became a unifying force that enabled protest while maintaining social inclusiveness. Section 2 is concerned with the production of graffiti as it occurs on built structures and in man-made environs, including ancient cities. It begins with Rebecca Benefiel’s CAJ 30:4, 705–706 © 2019 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research