In a synthesis of what was then known of Mesoamerican scribal traditions, Prem and Riese (1983) created a diagram to chart their temporal and geographical distribution, positing that they all were probably genealogically related, although their presumed common ancestral form was unknown. The earlier branch, starting ca. 400 BC, was the script of Monte Albán, which gave way to Zapotec writing, which in turn played a role in the development of the “Central Mexican writing horizon,” a wideranging phenomenon that endured for five hundred years (700–1200 AD). Yet no evidence spanning the abandonment of Monte Albán and the inception of “Mixtec writing” supported the instantiation of such a horizon in Oaxaca, and because writing was construed as glottic forms only, the authors assumed that no such script existed in the Basin of Mexico prior to 1000 AD; hence, the omission in their discussion of writing at Teotihuacan.

Currently, the earliest presumed evidence of glottic writing—in the southern Gulf Coast lowlands—has been pushed back to ca. 900 BC (Rodríguez Martínez et al. 2006), although it is unclear how it may relate to subsequent traditions. Also, the division of Oaxacan scripts was unwarranted, for Zapotec writing constituted a single enduring tradition (Urcid 2001, 2005). Furthermore, by defining a writing system as a set of social practices associated with an inventory of written signs (Harris 1995: 56), there is evidence of at least four other systems not charted in their column for Oaxaca, namely Ñuiñe, Coastal, Chiapanec, and post-Monte Albán scripts (Urcid 2011). Most important, the model of Prem and Riese does not account for the genealogical development of scripts (inception, branching off, discontinuity) in terms of social processes. They simply impose the analogy of the “tracing of descent” onto the different scalar dimension of scripts.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess what we presently know of scribal practices between 300 and 1000 AD in “highland Mesoamerica.” Specifically, the focus is on reckonings of time, writing at Teotihuacan, scripts and historicity, and scribal emulations in the context of interregional interaction.