Paleographic Dating of Birch Bark Manuscripts

Abstract

We address the problem of estimating the age of birch bark manuscripts from their appearance (paleographically). These birch bark manuscripts (BBMs) are one of the most valuable corpora of Old Russian texts, and a crucially important source of information about mediæval history and evolution of the language. Accurate dating of BBMs is necessary in order to place them in a correct historical context, before historians and linguists can take advantage of their valuable contents.