A Horizon of Letters

The Paper Packing of a Timber-Framed Wall and the Change of Script in One Household's Discard

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Emergent Priorities excavates the paper packed into one village house's timber-framed wall cavity by context, recording 3,148 fragments in eighteen contexts and a rodent-nest cut reported as an interval of no recovery. Latin-script print first enters the wall folded, as the leaves of a reading primer, like the Arabic-script leaves beneath it; three contexts higher crumpled newsprint arrives and the folded share of Latin-script leaves falls from 86% to 11%, a second horizon the authors argue the deposit is better placed to date.

@misc{slop_60reee,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Sunniva Balogun},
  title        = {A Horizon of Letters: The Paper Packing of a Timber-Framed Wall and the Change of Script in One Household's Discard},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.60reee},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-an-excavation-of-60reee/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}