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This paper seeks to understand how identity was constructed and communities were constituted in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age of parts of central and southern Britain. A holistic approach is favoured, finding patterns within each period that cross different types of evidence. These patterns can be related to underlying social and conceptual logic systems. It is argued that in the Late Bronze Age communities were relatively fluid and lineage played only a minor role in defining identity. Early Iron Age society was more concerned with ancestral genealogy and inter-generational inheritance. By the Middle Iron Age, this developed to the stage where smaller groups displayed increasing autonomy from each other. These social differences can account for many of the dissimilarities in the archaeological records of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. Despite contrasting methods of community organization, assessing contiguous periods under the same theoretical and methodological frameworks has proved a useful analytical device.
A fundamental distinction is made in craft production between custom or bespoke creation and mechanical reproduction that generates multiple iterations of the same form. In Mesoamerica, technologies of reproduction are attested by around the sixth century bc in the form of moulding and stamping, and they become increasingly common in ceramic production in the Maya and neighbouring regions in the third or fourth century. Beginning in the Late Classic period (c. 600–830 ad), Maya artisans applied them to the hieroglyphic script as well, generating a corpus of texts that are at once fundamentally distinct from and intimately linked to the broader scribal tradition dominated by hand-written texts. This article examines Classic Maya texts moulded and stamped on ceramics in the context of scribal practice and the social and cultural role of the script. I argue that these artefacts manifest changes not only in hieroglyphic production, but also in writing's role in user communities. Consequentially, they invite reconsideration of scribal practice's relationship to other crafting traditions, as well as the diversity of modes of engaging in Classic Maya scribal tradition.