About Traditions and Methods: Pictographic Research

Abstract

Research on pictographic documents has strongly evolved during the last few decades. Even though their differences have become less clear, five schools of thought can be distinguished, each one with its own objectives and methodologies.This paper makes a general description of the schools and traditions on this field, and reflects on their methods.Without pretending to be an exhaustive analysis, due to space constraints, the author’s goal is to shed some light on the evolution of research and to point out some problems and a few guidelines for future studies.