A Grammar of the Archaeological Record (Version 2, Beta release)

Structuring wholes. Typology

Principles of typological analysis

Giorgio Buccellati – April 2026

TYPES

The notion of “type”

A type may be defined as a cluster of traits or attributes which are shared by a number of elements.

Types are abstract entities if one looks at the way in which they are formalized. It is the goal of the grammar to define this formalization in terms both of the categories present and the process used in applying them.

But types refer to eminently concrete entities because they apply, in the archaeological context, to “things” that were perceived as real “wholes” by the ancients, a perception our methods aim to re-create.

The validity of a type definition depends on the precision and distinctiveness of the traits that are used to define the type.

In principle, the validity is independent from the total number of elements that can be identified as belonging to a given type. A type that includes only one exemplar is valid simply because of its morphological distinctiveness. The higher number of elements attested for any given type affects the power of the statistical analysis of the data.

The types as “wholes”

In the earlier discussion about “wholeness” I have emphasized the basic principle that typology entails the structuring of the fragments into “wholes.” Typology looks at these wholes from the point of view of their formal and substantive characteristics (through morphology and semiotics) – in other words:

the term “whole” refers to the conceptual dimension, and
the term “type” to the descriptive dimension.

Nesting

There is an additional level of complexity: types may be nested in progressive ranges of inclusiveness. We will look at this using the two examples of an aggregate (the tomb A8.8) and an assemblage (the conical cups), discussed above.

The tomb A8.8 is a “whole” which may be included in two broader wholes or parallel sets of elements.

On the one hand, it is to be seen within the wider context of the area where is was found – a sort of city of the dead, with a number of other burials in the midst of a living quarter of the city.
On the other, it should be considered as part of an assemblage of similar burial structures, from Urkesh and elsewhere, on the basis of a wider typology that relates to the shape of the tomb, the nature of the offerings, etc.

The conical cups assemblage, in turn, may be seen as part of a wider typological assemblage, in two regards.

Conical cups may be subdivided into finer sub-categories, depending on details of the shape.
They must in turn be seen within the full inventory of ceramic shapes from Urkesh, which at this point amounts to 936 types.

Referentiality

Central to the notion of type is the notion of referentiality: the type as an abstract category (e. g., the type “conical cup”) has a concrete referent (a physical conical cup).

The distance between the type and its referent is bridged intuitively by anyone familiar with the context. A carrier of a living tradition “lives” within the context, and thus has no difficulty in seeing the referent behind the type. In the case of a broken tradition the context is lost, and it is the aim of archaeology to re-create it. It is the task of typology.

The limits of referentiality

There are significant limits to any effort at re-creating the context. Looking at the A8.8 aggregate, we can immediately recognize it as being a burial, as the ancients would have; through typological analysis we can place it in a given social and chronological context; but we would never know the personality of the individual buried inside as his contemporaries would.

We address this issue from the perspective of awareness when dealing with hermeneutics.

-etic and -emic

The distinction with regard to referentiality reflects the distinction between -etic and -emic approaches. The terms, originating in linguistics, have become common place in anthropology and the social sciences.

-etic is taken from “phonetic”¹: it describes vocal sounds on the basis of articulatory or acoustic criteria. An such, an -etic system applies to any language, say Hurrian as much as Greek, without reference to either Hurrian or Greek culture.

-emic is taken from “phonemic” and it is culture specific: a Hurrian phoneme is operative only in Hurrian, just as a Greek phoneme is operative only in Greek.

The concepts of absolute and relative chronology are analogous. Absolute chronology in based on factors that are extraneous to the culture of the ancients (such as radiocarbon dating or dendrochronology) while relative chronology is based on connections among the data as understood to have functioned in their original context.

METHODS

Overview

Two methods may be applied in typological analysis, depending on whether referentiality applies or not..

Morphology does not have a referential context: the attributes that define a type do not refer to any aspect of the living setting within which the elements in questions were used.

Semiotics, on the other hand, is based on a referential system that applies to the social and ideational context that is assumed to be that of the ancient culture.

I will give here a brief overview of the methods, to highlight their respective approaches, and will then deal with them in detail in the following sections.

Stratigraphy and typology

The stated aim of the Urkesh Global Record is to fix in published form, first and foremost, the stratigraphic context of all the data. Such immediacy is the only way, I feel, to bring us closer to the ideal of objectivity – 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 typologically and functionally.

It goes without saying, however, that such a typological and functional analysis is the final goal of our endeavor, and as such it must be an integral part of the record at every step of the way. Hence much effort goes into a full, if perhaps never complete, typological categorization of the data.

Morphology

Typological morphology operates with criteria that are assumed to reflect categories not operative as such for the ancients. For example, the color of a ceramic sherd, its ware, its dimensions are defined in our grammar by categories that are extraneous to the ancient mindset – the metric scale (as in the drawing to the right), the Munsell color system, a chemical definition, etc.
Our categorization system (the metric system) would not have been recognized by the ancients. Thus the drawing of the sherd to the right, which follows our documentary standards, would in effect be incomprehensible to them, and so would our analytical description.

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This does not obviously mean that the ancients had no awareness of dimensions, color, ware; only that our “grammar” is structurally different from what would have been “their” grammar. It operates on the basis of a metrical precision (for dimensions), a codification system (for colors), chemical principles (for wares), that are all extraneous to the mindset of the ancients, and do not take that mindset into account.

Semiotics

Semiotics sees the elements of language as signs of equivalent elements in reality. For example, a word refers to a specific object (say, a drinking cup), a sentence refers to a specific process (a request for pouring a drink in the cup).

In linguistics, there are three major branches of semiotics: semantics, syntax and pragmatics. They may be seen to apply, in a derivative sort of way, and in a different order, to archaeological epistemics, and we may do this by pointing to three distinct ways in which the referent may be situated.

1. Semantics: observer’s referentiality

We, as observers, can hold in one hand a ceramic object like the one shown on the right, we can pour liquid in it and drink from it. These inferences may be regarded as obvious, and are formulated as soon as the cup appears – including our term "cup" which is already referential, and thus "semiotic" in nature. The object is referentially present to us as it was to the ancients, and in this case the language equivalence applies properly (e. g., Akkadian kāsu ~ English "cup").

A14.119

2. Syntax: context referentiality

In linguistics, the term "syntax" refers to how discrete elements (typically, words) interact with each other according to well defined rules. For example, in English a subject occurs before a verb in a positive sentence ("I may do this") and after a verb in interrogative sentence ("May I do this?").
I use the term in a derivative sense to indicate how different data are integrated with others to obtain a fuller sense by looking at the assemblage as a whole. Thus the clustering of conical cups points to a connection among these different items that is assumed to have been intentional and thus to have referential value.

An assemblage of conical cups

3. Pragmatics: user’s referentiality

     What emotional response would the object evoke in the subject holding it? Two seal impressions give us a clue: a cup is held in one hand by the king in one case and by the queen in the other, in a scene that indicates conviviality but points also to a special celebratory atmosphere.
     This takes us closer to the perception that the ancients had of this item – being used for ceremonial occasions, when the cup acquired a special meaning, to the point of being rendered several times on the seals of queen Uqnitum.
     See also below under Hermeneutics.

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References

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Notes

¹^ Properly, the term should be (e)-tic, since the suffix is applied to the noun phone, just as it is to galac-tic or hermeneu-tic.