Referentiality

Giorgio Buccellati – January 2026

The ancient referents

Any element we find today in the ground referred in the past to a specific dimension in the life of its users: a house was a home for certain individuals; a grave was recognized as a resting place for deceased members of a given family; a certain vessel was used exclusively for divinatory purposes; and so on. Each element carried a specific meaning, known to the living carriers of that cultural tradition.

But, as found by us in the ground, archaeological data bear little or no direct evidence to such reference. A wall or a sherd can be identified as artifacts, i. e., as something made for a given use. But the degree of referentiality is at first limited to just that definition: a mudbrick wall or a ceramic sherd.

There is emphasis in current archaeological theory on the significnace of “things” and their materiality. These “things” are and were “referents“¹: for us, the degree of referentiality is limited and obscured, whereas for the ancients it was full and transparent.

Accordingly, the notion of referentiality is important for our discussion about typology.

A proper definition of the system of referentiality is important also with regard to the notion of objectivity, because this is proportional to the degree of referentiality we imply for any given statement about the elements as found.

The referential dimension

A painting by Magritte has acquired an iconic valence in describing the notion of referentiality (Everaert-Desmedt 1999).
Contradicting Magritte's statement inscribed in the painting, we may say that "this is a pipe – referentially." The referential dimension is real because there is only one pipe that can match this representation. The reality is in the referential dimension.

R. Magritte
(Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

Degrees of specificity

In any given case, however, the referent may hold different degrees of specificity. The immediate referent for us, in Magritte’s painting, is the object used for smoking. For a contemporary of the painter, it may have been a pipe of a specific brand. For the painter, it may have been the pipe of a friend or a relative. And so on.

The notion of referentiality is central to our discussion about typology.

Referential analysis

The aim of archaeological referential analysis is to define the ways in which a referent is known, both to us and to the ancients.

In other words, our epistemic process aims to recover as full a referential dimension as possible, i. e., to make the referent unequivocal and transparent within the existing limits. In practice, we may distinguish four levels of referentiality, which define various types of grammatical methods.

These levels are in turn related to four different stages in the process of recovery. Each referential level corresponds in fact to a different moment in the sequence of steps involved in the process,. These steps are temporally antecedent to the referential definition, and are based on the way in which one looks at each element.

recovery reference
1 stratigraphy: isolating elements fixed place
typology 2 morphology: identifying patterns extra-cultural standards
3 semiotics: clues to ancient perception function and use
4 hermeneutics: the inferential process meaning

1. Stratigraphy: reference to place

A first level of referentiality is found when elements are first excavated and isolated in the matrix. At that point reference is only to whether or not the identity of the element is tied to place. Thus, a feature is defined as stationary, i. e., tied to a given location in the ground, and an item as movable, i. e., its identity is independent of place.

This is important in terms of the dynamics entailed in the recovery process and in the establishing of the record, the goal being for the original observations about emplacement and deposition to be public in their original state, without being filtered through the subsequent crystallization process when data are analyzed morphologically and functionally.

2. Morphology: reference to extra-cultural standards

Morphology defines elements with reference to formal patterns and standards that are independent of the original culture. They are of two types.

Mensuration consists of established scales such as centimetric measurements for size; hue, chroma and value for colors (Munsell system); profiles for shapes; etc.
Definition gives a common sense identification of any given feature or item, providing an explanation for the term. For instance, the term “jar” is explained as defining a ceramic vessel of a certain size and shape, that would be held with two hands if large, that could contain liquids or loose materials, and so on.

The definition section within morphology is a preliminary form of semiotics: the term “jar” implies a given functional use when applied to a given item. We call it “primary function.” The procedure is valid as it is based on well defined and verifiable formal traits: it is a valid assumption that the criteria used, being universal in nature, would have applied to the ancient users as they apply to us. The ancients would have instinctively recognized this “thing” we call a “jar” as something that could hold liquid, that would be too large to be held with one hand, and so on. The claim then is that these traits were operative in the awareness of the ancients only because they apply universally within a human context.

Sequentially, this step happens very soon after excavation. in a preliminary way at the very time of excavation and subsequently in the lab, with greater precision.

3. Semiotics: reference to function and use

Semiotics elevates the referential claim to a higher level: we attribute, to any given elements, traits which relate to what we assume was the function in antiquity, and to how the ancients would have in fact “known” and used these elements. Within the grammar we use three different sets of clues to achieve this goal (see below for examples).

Semantics matches words found in the textual evidence with features or items found in the excavation.
Syntax recognizes a regularity of cooccurrences that cannot be accidental, so that we can plausibly infer that the clustering of elements signals an original intention and consequently an original function.
Pragmatics leads us to analyze and understand processes – the case of experimental archaeology provides a good example.

Semiotic details are generally added long after the excavation, during subsequent periods of study, especially in relation to the study of given corpora (ceramics, figurines, etc.). It is at this stage that the special rosters and lexica are activated, creating very complex distributional arrangements, see the ceramics digital book for an example.

4. Hermeneutics: reference to meaning

This type of referentiality takes us to a level that relies on elaborate inferences, correlating data to a variety of other data from the excavations and beyond, in order to assess what the deeper meaning of the elements would have been for the ancients, a meaning it can still hold for us.

An example. That the abi would have induced a sense of awe can be assumed simply by knowing what its function was – a place for evoking the spirits of the Netherworld. But we can add an additional clue from the observation that, at some point in time, from being an open air pit it became an enclosed, cavernous looking structure – a transformation we attribute to the presence of Akkadian queens at the court of Urkesh: given their cultural background, they would have been quite unaccustomed to the rituals performed there, and the accompanying fear would have called for covering the pit as a measure of safety.

It is because of this particular role of referentiality that hermeneutics may be considered to be essentially beyond grammar.

Notes

¹^ The term “referent” is ambivalent: it can stand either for what is being denoted or for that which denotes something. In the current context it is used in the first sense: refers to the element to which reference is made. In the section on categorization, instead, it refers to a constituent (such as a photo) which refers to an element.

		recovery	reference
1		stratigraphy: isolating elements	fixed place
typology	2	morphology: identifying patterns	extra-cultural standards
typology	3	semiotics: clues to ancient perception	function and use
4		hermeneutics: the inferential process	meaning