A Grammar of the Archaeological Record (Version 2)

Introduction

Historical development of the Grammar

Giorgio Buccellati – January 2025

Background

The Grammar as presented in this website is at the confluence of several strands of research, two of which have come to be realized in different embodiments:

the pure theoretical aspect has been fully developed in the 2017 book A Critique of the Archaeological Record
the operational aspect is now consigned to the dedicated website Digital Operations Manual

One will find a review of the various stages of the digital project in a separate section of the Cybernetica Mesopotamica website. Here, I will describe especially those aspects that affected the formation of the theoretical grammatical scaffoding on which the UGR ultimately depends.

Phases

Pre-digital (1970s)

While the intellectual goals were clear in my mind since the early stages of my effort, published references have been limited. The main reason for this was the need to accompany the theory with a substantial and fully coherent body of data that would exemplify the application of the theory. One important publication was the 1978 IIMAS Field Encoding Manual (Non-digital), ARTANES 2. It was in function of the Terqa excavations, which had begun in 1976.

By 1978 we already had in place some of the earliest versions of micro-computers, as they were called in contrast with mainframe and mini-computers (the later being mid-size machines). In fact, they were not micro at all in size, though they were so in digital power. But the concomitant beneficial effect of these limitations was that my attention was constantly directed at the importance of the theoretical framework above and beyond the niceties of the machines. The title stresses the “non-digital” aspect, because at that time we were not yet ready for a fully digital implementation, but were well aware that we were working towards such an implementation.

It is in the nature of things that encoding should have taken precedence. But the concern for structural coherence, and hence for a theoretical cohesiveness, guided our efforts since a very early date – witness this statement from the preface to the 1978 Encoding Manual:

More importantly, the forms should be viewed as a structural system of interlocking parts and understood as forming an organism. To be sure, it is an organism which is alive, therefore subject to change, at the very moment that it is being applied; but change will have to respect the internal physiognomy of the system and the structural interrelationship of the parts at the very moment they are seen to evolve. (p. 5)

...it is in the nature of forms to provide a channeled avenue for observation and recording: it is as if there were a monitoring device built into the moment of primary analysis, which warns of the potential elements present in the data. This heightens, on the one hand, the power of perception; it trains, on the other hand, our sensitivity for the structured universe into which the data fit. Concretely, this means that we are less likely to forget details or short circuit operations, and that we are more apt to gain a meaningful understanding of the whole even while worrying about the parts. Obviously, forms should not become a mental straitjacket, hence the format allows for free-form observations, while in addition narrative descriptions are encouraged throughout as a supplement to the forms. (p. 5-6)

Early formalization (1980-90s)

Already at the Terqa excvations, and then especially at Urkesh, the system became more formalized for digital use, as truly portable computers (“laptops”) became accessible. This took the shape of well developed Encoding Manuals, which were meant to serve primarikly the needs of data entry during the excavations. Each new season had an updated version of the encoding manual, until the 1996 version reached a stage which remained substantially unchanged in later seasons.

The theoretical framework was strong, but it remained implicit. Only a few points were highlighted, especially in a page giving the “Principles and presuppositions” of the system, which I have included now as “axioms” in the UGR website.

Consolidation (2000s)

Out of the encoding manuals came the grammar proper. From the start, this was intended to be a separate website, one that would insert the coding system within a broader theoretical framework concerning especially statigraphy and typology (accessed from the left side bar), and provide a how to guide for the practical operations (accessed from the right side bar).

The website began to provide an initial statement about the broader framework within which the codification would apply. For example, the codes about strata are seen from the point of view of clustering:

The notion of clustering finds its prime realization in the concept of stratum. This is a cluster of elements arranged according to the type of contact, and sorted according to nesting criteria that result in discrete wholes. These wholes are defined by the congruence of the elements in contact (e.g., a series of pits cut into a single accumulation), and by broad elements that extend to an entire volumetric unit (e.g., a floor that covers the entire surface of a locus). (Grammar version 1, 2009)

This went beyond the simple definition of the codes, and it was largely implemented in 2009 and 2010, but, qua version 1, it remained an unfinished task until I resumed the full revision of the Grammar which comes to fruition now with the current version 2.

Bifurcation (2010s)

Following the suspension of the excavations at the site of Urkesh in 2011, a more sustained effort came into effect with regard to the entire system. What soon emerged was the need to give pride of place to the theoretical aspect: this resulted in the publication of the volume A Critique of Aechaeological Reason and the concomitant website. The theory was here expanded and placed within a wider framework that that of the Urkesh project. See also below.

The Grammar website came thus to be dedicated specifically to this project. It was the concretization of the theoretical principles, aiming to show how the principlea could operate in practice. It still would serve the purpose of the Encoding Manuals, guiding the staff during excavations, but showing at the same time how definitions and operations would fit within the wider theoretical framework that had been formulated in the Critique volume. This first version remained in a preliminary state of completion.

Finalization (2020s)

As I am now bringing the process to its conclusion, I opted for one further bifurcation:

the Grammar proper (this website) deals with the definition of the elements, seen in their full context: it is so that elements become constituents. Thus when dealing with stratigraphy a sharp distinction is proposed between four different sspects, and it is within each of these that the elements have to understood.
I opted for a second website to deal instead with the operations. How do we deal with the elements once they have been defined requires a different set of skills: this task is indirectly “grammatical,” in that it is tightly linked to the grammatical “universe,” but it is essentially a reference tool used to create the archive which includes the totality of the elements – the “global record.”

Excerpts

I will here bring out, with some brief excerpts, how the “grammatical” concern developed over the years, in ways that helped to crystallize the system as it is presented in this website. A full list is given below in the sections on References,under Lectures and Publications.

2000

The first public lecture (in Italian) about the notion of a Grammar was at the City Museum in Como, entitled: Prolegomena to a structural grammar of archaeological data. The concept of “laws” was prominent in what was then termed the “New Archaeology,” and to balance that I was suggesting that:

The true archaeological universals are the laws of deposition. A grammar of stratigraphy articulates these laws, and sets standards for emplacement: the notion of “Grammar” is based on systemic inclusiveness and power of explanation, and precise definitions are based on structural opposition between elements.

2005

In an article dealing with “The Tell Mozan/Urkesh Archaeological Project: an Integrated Approach of Spatial Technologies,” Federico Buccellati dealt with the integration of data into a broader (grammatical) system:

Our system relies on notes written in a structured format which is then run through a program that merges all the files and sorts them by referent, giving a global file for each stratigraphic unit or object as output. In this way, notes taken by different members of the field team, the photographer, curator and conservator are all merged into a single file that contains all the documentation relating to a certain item or stratigraphic unit.

2006

The next well developed presentation was given at the Ancient Orient Museum in Tokyo. Taking as a starting point the then current interest in theory, the point was made that what is normally envisaged are

theories of inference: they deal with what can be extracted from the data. But there has been practically no theory at all about the procurement of the data. In other words, no theory of excavation. This is what I have been developing, and I call it a Grammar of the Archaeological Record. This Grammar rests on a fully articulated set of principles, in particular a sharp differentiation between emplacement and deposition and a rigorous definition of categories and of processes.

In the same year, I introduced the notion of a “Browser edition,” which is made possible by the application of a properly grammatical approach:

The main virtue of the term [Grammar], and especially of the concept that it evokes, is that it excludes ad hoc solutions. A grammar

has to be fully comprehensive of the entire universe of data;
it has to establish distributional classes that are truly mutually exclusive;
it has to articulate a hierarchy of conceptual nodes into which the categories properly fit;
it has to identify explicitly the attributes that define each category.
And in all this, a grammar must combine, through a constant give and take, the power of deduction derived from generalized systems of principles with the skill of induction based on the observation of the actual data. (p. 315 f.)

2007

A 2007 full-fledged symposium in Austin covered the many facets of the Urkesh project. A paper on the theoretical principles dealt especially with the grammatical aspect:

They constitute a closed “grammatical” system whereby each element is endowed, implicitly, with multiple tags. The application of programs makes explicit the full web of paradigmatic connections that these tags imply, and it automatically creates a fully hyperlinked browser edition. Each time a program is run, it updates the very same presentation that constitutes the core of the final publication.

2008

In a joint article with the ceramic typologist, we expanded on the notion of a Browser Edition and brought out the way in which disparate elements are combined through the use of a paradigmatic approach:

a closed "grammatical" system whereby each element is endowed, implicitly, with multiple tags. The application of programs makes explicit the full web of paradigmatic connections that these tags imply, and it automatically creates the final presentation, which is fully hyperlinked. [...] In so doing, we seek to achieve the two complementary goals of a rigorous preservation of every single atomistic observation on the one hand, and, on the other, to construct a meaninghl and intuitive framework within which all the observations cohere. (p. 1)

2009-10

A preliminary version of the website gave the basic outline as it is still used in the current Version 2. The notion of grammar was explicitly aticulated in an introductory page, which is largely retained in the current version. I will report here a few salient points:

... a grammar aims to be powerful more than it aims to be correct: the sum total of the sentences that can be spoken in a language is a grammar of sorts, and a correct one at that, but quite obviously far from powerful. In my view, the stratigraphic record remains, in the standard approach, by and large ungrammaticalized. The data are understood as a language might be for which no grammar is provided; but their integration into a unified conceptual structure is incomplete and inarticulate.

My main goal is to suggest ways to produce such a grammar, [...] I would like to claim some power for this approach, but I will not claim that it is the correct grammar. I hope that it might generate sufficient interest in the subject matter, and that the supporting exemplification will prove to be sufficiently valid, so as to elicit a new awareness for the underlying problems, a realistic sense of reliance on the electronic medium used for its genuine powers, and a discussion of the substantive issues involved in this effort to “grammaticalize” the stratigraphic record.

2012

A lecture given in Moscow and then reprised as an article deals with the notion of grammaticality in a strict sense, as it is used in the linguistic realm:

The method I propose is a grammatical one, in the sense of a closed syntactical and syntagmatic categorization system that allows statements of predictability and of non-occurrence. (P. 37)

It is in this sense that I conceive of an “archaeological central theory,” in terms of itself (rather than of “anthropology” or whatever else), defining its constitutive elements and showing how they are structurally integrated into a closed “grammatical” system. I take “grammaticality” to refer to the paradigmatic predictability of correlations. It is not used in a vague analogical sense. It refers instead to the definition of rigorous paradigmatic and syntagmatic coherence of the defining categories, that are nested within each other according to well articulated hierarchical modes. (p.41)

2014-15

Cattolica seminar, see CAR

2015

The comparison with linguistic grammatical theory was taken up in an article dealing with compositional patterns in the figurative arts. It does not speak about grammar as such, but it deals with an aspect of linguistics, i. e., discourse analysis, that is related to a grammatical mode of tnhought:

Composition is what holds the tensional elements together. On the one hand, the compositional process fuses the elements we have seen so far into a single structural whole. On the other, compositional analysis identifies the criteria that are originally introduced to obtain such a fusion. The term used in the case of word based texts (whether spoken or written) is discourse analysis or rhesiology. (P. 295)

What is common to both the visual and the textual record is the presupposition of, and search for, an underlying coherence of the whole. Its main overall trait is structural inclusivity: each of the components depends on the other (hence the dimension of tensionality) and it excludes elements that do not share in this reciprocal dependence. (P. 296)

2017

The year 2017 was a major turning point in the theoretical definition of what a gramamr should be, in three ways:

(1) The Critique book

(2) The Critique website

biblio search for gramma

(3) A programmatic article

2020

CAMNES lecturs

Programming

An essential aspect of a digital project relates to the way in which data are processed, from the level of software packages to custom programs that interact in a univocal way with the coded data.