Acquiring knowledge

Giorgio Buccellati – March 2026

The epistemic framework

     In this second part of the Epistemics section, we will look at the system in terms of how data are acquired during excavations.
     This concerns both the moment of excavation itself and the analysis that follows, these two processes being qualified here as "disentangling" and "structuring."
     I will give below a concise definition of each category, a fuller definition being given under each heading in the rest of the Grammar.

Disentangling

Along with re-structuring, this is the one epistemic process that is exclusively found in archaeology. Stratigraphic analysis, a method that is proper to no other discipline, deals with the material as coming to light from within the matrix of the soil. The grammar deals with these “pristine” data at the moment of their “disentanglement.”

Structuring

Once extracted (“disentangled”) from their matrix, the grammar identifies patterns of cooccurrence of shared traits among the items now seen in their identity as well defined elements of material culture. This results in assemblages where the components share the same structure (typological analysis) and can be related to a wider historical and archaeological context (integrative analysis).