Jan-Tage Kristiansen
Jan-Tage Kristiansen (born 1971) is a Norwegian-Estonian philologist and independent researcher based in Tallinn. He trained as a linguist at the University of Bergen, where his MA thesis examined positional constraints in runic epigraphy, before completing a doctorate at the University of Tartu in 2001 on graphemic variability in undeciphered scripts of the eastern Baltic region.
Kristiansen worked for several years as a cataloguer at the Estonian History Museum before leaving institutional employment to pursue independent research. He has described his working method as "palaeographic accountancy": systematic inventory of graphemic features before any interpretive commitment.
Work
Kristiansen's correspondence note "Twin renderings, single template: a ruled signary on a putative cervid scapula" (language 27, October 2023: 1073–1074) introduced the alphanumeric coding system now used throughout the scholarly literature on the Scapula Glyph Inscription and related texts. The note described a short, four-line inscription on a scapula-shaped object, identified nine visually coherent sign families (labelled A through T, with P reserved for the divider), and provided a full positional frequency table. Kristiansen declined to propose a cultural attribution, noting that circulating images of the object appeared to derive from a single original drawing and that higher-resolution imaging was desirable before drawing further conclusions.
The coding system he established, in which each sign receives a family letter and index number (C01, B04, P01, and so on), was subsequently adopted without modification by Ginevra Rubergskier, Camille Voudrin, Inrik Üksküla, and others, giving the note an influence disproportionate to its two-page length.
Kristiansen has continued to maintain the signary as a stable reference document, issuing minor corrections to the preliminary frequency table following the appearance of higher-quality tracings in 2024. He has not published a full interpretive article of his own, describing his role as "keeping the inventory honest."
Other interests
Outside the Kristiansen corpus, Kristiansen has published short notes on pre-Christian Baltic carved artefacts and on quantitative approaches to grapheme classification. He maintains a low profile and rarely attends conferences in person.