Broken traditions

Giorgio Buccellati – July 2026

A “broken” language

In its primary sense, the term “grammar” is used in reference to a language. And we rightly think a language as an organic whole, which we confront in its wholeness.

But what happens when we are faced with a language preserved only in fragments, through a written medium? In and of themselves, the fragments do not cohere into a wholeness: they represent a fraction of the potential expressive power of the language. We are missing a living speaker who can answer questions as to what can or cannot be said, as to what is “grammatical” or not.

It is certain, however, that the language to which the fragments give testimony can be presupposed to be a living organism, and in this perspective the fragments do answer questions that might probe the language in its wholeness. The grammar presupposed is the grammar we can identify and reconstruct. The fragments must fit into the wholeness.

We may thus speak of a “broken” language in the sense that it is attested only through the fragments. It is broken, but it is not dead. It is only the speakers who are dead. It is broken because we only have fragments, but it emerges from them as a living organism. We can in fact answer, through the coherence of the fragments, questions about the possibility and impossibility, about the “grammaticality” of linguistic forms.

Buccellati 2011 Babylonian; 2012 Linguistic model

A broken tradition

Analogously, the archaeological physical record consists of a vast congeries of disaggregated data. These fragments, too, serve as witnesses of a living organism, a cultural tradition that integrated them into the wholeness of life.

Just as the textual fragments can be analyzed grammatically in terms of the language to which they give evidence, so can the archaeolgical fragments be analzyed grammatically in terms of the cultural tradition to which they give evidence.

Degrees of brokenness

There are, however, two major differences between a broken language and a broken tradition. (1) A broken language builds on a coherent set of fragments, whereas a broken tradition draws on a very diverse universe. (2) But for a few exceptions, there is only one broken language in any given context, whereas we generally have not one, but several broken traditions attested side by side and intersecting each other.

(1) Coherence of the fragments

The textual fragments reflect a language as a well and tightly defined organism, one that implied mutual understanding among speakers. The grammar applies rigorously, and major ruptures in the system cause a lack of understanding. The degree of coherence is essential.

With cultural data as found in an excavation, instead, the degree of coherence is more flexible. The “grammar” of a cultural organism leaves ample room for variations: an iron object in the bronze age might be wholly “ungrammatical” (hence “impossible”), but a foreign import from a distant land could easily be integrated in the local cultural inventory.

(2) Multiplicity of traditions

Even if uncommon, it is possible to find in any given site textual fragments that give evidence of different languages, for example Sumerian and Akkadian. The fact that the fragments are found together does not necessarily imply that they give evidence of one and the same language.

While exceptional for language, such a situation is a rule for cultural tradition. We do in fact encounter, as a rule, multiple broken traditions attested side by side in one and the same site. The distinctiveness may be due on the one hand to chronology(especially at sites that have been occupied for centuries if not millennia), on the other to social factors (different groups lived side by side in the same settlement and the evidence is meged in the stratification of the site).

Facing the brokenness: the epistemic dimension

Epistemics refers to the way in which we come to “know” this brokenness. We deal, as we have seen, with broken traditions that have no living carriers, no inheritors of a culture of which we have only fossils, mute witnesses of a life once lived.

The data are mute, but they are indeed witnesses. Archaeology refers to the way in which we seek to understand what the fragments give witness to. This is the epistemic dimension, and there are various ways in which this epistemic confrontation happens – there are, in other words, different “archaeologies.”