Archaeology News

A 40-YEAR research project to map York’s historic past is finally nearing completion.

A series of maps showing how the city developed from Roman times to the present day is set to be published, along with essays by leading academics.

Dr Peter Addyman, chairman of York Civic Trust, had the idea of creating the cartographic study of the city’s development when he founded York Archaeological Trust in 1972.

We see it every day on signs, billboards, packaging, in books and magazines; in fact, you are looking at it now — the Latin or Roman alphabet, the world’s most prolific, most widespread abc.

Typography is a relatively recent invention, but to unearth the origins of alphabets, we will need to travel much farther back in time, to an era contemporaneous with the emergence of (agricultural) civilisation itself.

Robert Bringhurst wrote that writing is the solid form of language, the precipitate.[1] But writing is also much more than that, and its origins, its evolution, and the way it is now woven into the fabric of civilisations makes it a truly wonderful story. That story spans some 5,000 years.