Giorgio Buccellati 2006

“An Archaeologist on Mars,”
Confronting the Past, pp. 17-21.

“Go up any of the ancient tells and walk about, / see the skulls of people from ages ago and from yesteryear: / can you tell the difference?” (p. 17).

This quotation (adapted by the author) from ancient Mesopotamian Dialogue of Pessimism is mentioned to clarify how also ancient peoples retained an awareness about their own past, their culture “as evidence by material remains” (p. 17). Starting from recent studies of G. Dever in Biblical tradition and archaeology, the author tries to define “the epistemological underpinnings of the [archaeological] discipline” (p. 17).

The starting point is the definition(s) of ‘archaeology’, perceived and understood not in a dichotomic connection or differentiation with other disciplines, but as a peculiar ‘art’ itself (to explain “archaeology as archaeology” [p. 18]).

Archaeology can be defined in two way: stricto sensu, as the discipline of “the stratigraphic analysis, through excavation, of cultural remains embedded in the ground” lato sensu, as the study of broken traditions” (p. 18). The stratigraphic analysis is based on the concepts of emplacement (which “refers to how ‘things’ are in a complex matrix that includes other ‘things’” [p. 18]) and on “the reconstruction of depositional history [where] deposition is how things got to where they are when they are found” (p. 18). Archaeologists “must discover, so as to ‘de-cipher’” (p. 19) the meaning of these broken traditions.

Anyhow, “cultural remains unearthed by the archaeologists are buried not only physically but also metaphorically” (p. 19): it means that, as in the field of scientific studies about autism [see the author’s quotation of O. Sacks on p. 19)], sometimes archaeologists can feel as ‘archaeologists on Mars’, with no patterns of interpretation of a cultural tradition which is completely different (and not only broken).

Differently, patterns of interpretation can be applied (within a rigorous ‘grammar’) by archaeologists to understand ancient cultures, which are ‘human’ as they are. “The experience of the ancients, broken though it is, can be reinserted in ours – not in a fantastic mode but through scholarly reasoning” (p. 20); archaeology “starts with the greatest distance – the mute testimony of a material culture cut off from our experience – and ends with the resurrection of a culture and, through it, of the experience behind that culture” (p. 20).

[About the topic of the ‘broken tradition’, see e.g. Buccellati 2014; about the ‘grammar’ on which archaeology must be established, the concepts of ‘emplacement’ and ‘depositional history’, see Buccellati 2017 and (for the Critique of the Archaeological Reason) CAR Website; specifically on the ‘grammar’ applied at Urkesh, see Grammar] – [A nice and instructive comic about the concept of the ‘archaeological interpretation and its hermeneutic’ is represented by: D. Macaulay 1979, Motel of the Misteries, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company (Archive.org, on loan)].