It meant imagining materials moving with travelers, sailors, craftspeople, merchants, migrants, and communities—knowledge passing from one person to another and changing as it entered new landscapes.
India became especially important to this exploration because of its long and complex histories of contact with Africa and because African-descended communities have lived there for centuries. These histories encouraged me to look more closely at possible relationships among Africa, India, and China and to ask how technologies of writing, pigments, materials, and cultural knowledge might have moved through the ancient world.
And what I discovered about writing ultimately became more than a history of marks placed upon a surface. It became a reflection of my own inner awareness—a way of trusting intuition enough to follow a thread, while remaining open to where the evidence might eventually lead.
