Broken traditions

Giorgio Buccellati – February 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 if we were to be faced with a language preserved only in fragments, preserved through a written medium? The fragments would give us evidence for “broken” language, i. e, precisely, one that evidenced only in disconnected segments. 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 cannot ask the fragments to answer questions that might probe the language in its wholeness. Or can we?

Yes, we can. The process of “decypherment” takes the fragments (“cyphers”)

A broken tradition

Unlike a language, the archaeological physical record is not an organic whole: it is rather vast congeries of disaggregated data. But for few exceptions, the things as found do not reflect their original living setting. It is as if an ancient text were discovered not in one piece, shredded into a multitude of scattered fragments which only partially add up to the original complete document. Hence a grammar of the archaeological record must go through two intermediate steps, one that defines the “things” as found, the other that defines them in terms of their original function and thus re-aggregates them into wholeness.

Such a grammar is, we might say, a grammar at the power of two. There are two concomitant aspects:

how the totality of the data as found can be accounted for, i. e., how a grammar can document the disaggregated elements in their emplacement, and then
how the data can be recomposed into unity, i. e., how a grammar can lead to a reconstruction of the cultural whole to which the fragments give witness.

The concept

Archaeology is often understood

A “dead” language?

There is no such thing as a dead language

Buccellati 2012 Linguistic model

A “broken” tradition

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