Blaise Aguera y Arcas
Princeton University

Gutenberg is credited with having invented the typographic printing process in the West around 1450. Insofar as any single technological development of the past millennium can be said to be the most important, this is a good candidate, as popular "millennium retrospectives" of the past year have been unanimous in pointing out. Printing has also been regarded as an exception to the general principle that technological advances happen incrementally; it is held that his idea, full-blown at its birth, remained virtually unchanged until the typographic developments of the 19th century. We have studied early printing from an archaeological standpoint, focusing in particular on survivals from Gutenberg's press. Using simple data analysis techniques based on high-resolution digital photography of these survivals, we have been able to find direct evidence of the technologies used to create them. These technologies do not in fact correspond to typographic printing in the modern sense. Although we are only beginning to develop a comprehensive picture of the early development of printing, it has become clear that Gutenberg was only the first of a series of European experimenters, who gradually "evolved" the concepts and methods of typography over a period of several decades.