Back to top: Preface
“Grammar”
The concept of”grammar” entails more than a set of rules. It proposes a coherent and tightly knit organism, capable of accounting for the most minute of details while a the same time viewing the whole in its structural complexity. The linguistic model operates with a living organism, even with the so-called “dead” languages: Babylonian has not been spoken for more than two millennia, but it is a living organism to the extent that we can retrieve it from the available texts.
The quality of a grammar is judged in part by its “power,” i. e., the effectiveness with which it can, on the one hand, account for the data and, on the other, generate an appropriate output. In the case of a linguistic grammar, this refers to a mutually understandable oral communication. 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.
Back to top: Preface
The “archaeological record”
The archaeological record, unlike a language, is not so organic. It is vast congeries of disaggregated data. But for few exceptions, the constituents as found are not the constituents as operative. Hence their grammar must go through two intermediate steps, one that defines the “things” as found, the other that defines them in terms of their orignal function and thus re-aggregates them into wholeness.
A grammar of the archaeological record is, we might say, a grammar at the power of two. There are two concomitant aspects, which correspond to the double nature of such an archaeological grammar:
- how the totality of the data as found can be accounted for, i. e., how a grammar can document the disaggregated elements as found, and then
- how the data can be recomposed into unity, i. e., how it can lead to a reconstruction of the cultural whole to which the fragments give witness.
Back to top: Preface
Goals and limits
My main goal is to suggest ways to “grammaticalize” the stratigraphic record, by proposing a specific sample (this grammar) which is applied to a given body of data (the UGR website).
I would like to claim some power for this approach, but I will not claim that it is the correct grammar. I hope my effort 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.
Back to top: Preface
“Global” record and browser edition
The system as described has been developed in the course of the excavations at Tell Mozan, ancient Urkesh, and the results are embodied in the publication of this global record (UGRS). The ultimate form taken by the record is that of a browser edition, as described in the UGR website.
A primary goal of the system, and of the browser edition that derives from it, remains the primacy of the stratigraphic record as such, which is deemed in principle to be completed at the end of the excavation. Thus, in the measure in which our own ability to work within the system as here described increases, we intend to publish the full stratigraphic record of any given operation at end of each excavation season, allowing for typological updates to the extent in which our own typological analysis proceeds. What makes the electronic publication unique in this respect is precisely the ability to update the archive in such a way that it remains at all times an integrated whole.
Back to top: Preface