Archaeologies: the five epistemics

Giorgio Buccellati – July 2026

“Archaeology”

Literally, the term refers to the way in which we “speak” (-logy) about “antiquity” (archaeo-), just as “theology” refers to speaking about god, “sociology” about society, “epistemology” about knowledge.

But “speaking” entails a form of knowledge. It refers, in other words, to an epistemic process: how do we know the object about which we are speaking?

This object of knowledge is generally understood, in a generic sense, to be what we have considered as broken traditions: we speak about an antiquity which is detached from our experience. It is in this sense that “archaeology” differs, in common understanding, from “history,” which includes a past with which we can more easily identify.

“Archaeologies”

Thee are different “archaeologies” depending on the epistemic dimension that is privileged. Thus we may look at

the culture from which the evidence originated (Mesopotamian, industrial, etc.),
the material data (buildings, artifacts, esc.),
the technique that is applied to the data (underwater, digital, etc.),
the method used to attribute measning (processual, ethnoarchaeology, etc.),
and more.

The five epistemics

Here, we will distinguish five different ways in which we “know” broken traditions. We “know” these traditions in different ways depending on the approach we use and its formalization.

Outer view: a first look at a site, a standing monument or an object.
Contextual excavation and correlative typology: Excavation is the process through which we confront discrete elements embedded within an amorphous mass. As we do this, we disengage the context and describe how the elements are in contact with each other, describing them according to a formal categorization system.
Constructional analysis: we look at the processes through which elements came into existence as they were originally “constructed”. Here the epistemic dimension emerges from the projected insight into what the dynamics would have been in the planning and executing of what we see as a finished product.
Antiquarian view: monuments and objects are described in terms of purely typological criteria, without reference to a stratigraphic context.
Socio-cultural development: the material culture we expose carried a specific meaning for the carriers of that socio-cultural tradition, a meaning we can retrieve through epistemics and appropriate as ours through hermeneutics.

We will describe individually each of these five epistemic systems in the following pages.