Grammar

Giorgio Buccellati – August 2026

“Grammar”

A grammar is the tool of choice for an epistemic analysis of any body of data. It defines an organism in terms of how it is known: seeing an object as an organic set of entities and relationships, it translates this set into an organic epistemic structure, i. e., a structure that reflects how we know that body of data. In other terms, grammar defines the parameters of knowledge: wherever there is knowledge, there is grammar.

As I apply this concept to the archaeological record, we need to reflect on the wider implications of the term. The aim is to show how the term so understood provides a powerful conceptual tool for looking in an organic way at the cognitive process that accompanies every excavation. Both the epistemic and the hermeneutic dimensions of the archaeological endeavor can thus be more properly controlled and explained. The grammar looks at the excavation process as an organic whole, which must be seen precisely in its wholeness.

If reduced to a set of rules and instructions, grammar is then seen merely, with regard to archaeology, as an operational manual. It is instead, much more meaningfully, the method through which we can articulate in an organic way our knowlegde of archaseology.

Power

The quality of a grammar is judged in part by its “power,” i. e., the effectiveness with which it can account for the data on the one hand and generate an output on the other. In the case of a linguistic grammar, this refers to a mutually understandable oral communication. In our context, this refers to how the totality of the data as found can be accounted for, in the first place, and then to how the data can be recomposed into unity. There are, therefore, two concomitant aspects.

The two levels of an archaeological grammar

In common usage, the term “grammar” is restricted to the linguistic domain: it refers to the description of a language and to the rules that govern it. A language is a tightly knit organism, and a linguistic grammar can rely on this organic wholeness of the object it describes.

The archaeological record, unlike a language, is not so organic. It is vast congeries of disaggregated data. But for few exceptions, the constituents as found are not the constituents as operative.

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.

In other words, 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.

In a way, this corresponds to the classic distinction in a linguistic grammar between phonology on the one hand (minimal constituents and their properties), and, on the other, morphology and syntax (primary clustering and distributional arrangement).

The limits of experience

The linguistic model enlightens us on an important aspect of grammatical analysis. The epistemic dimension does not in and of itself entail experience: knowing the grammar of a language does not make us native speakers. In a similar way, reconstructing the grammar of a broken tradition does not make us living carriers of that tradition.

At the same time, however, epistemics is the safest channel to hermeneutics. We may properly envisage an ability to appropriate a tradition even withtou living it through an assent to its basic set of values. In this regard, hermenutics emerges as distinctive effort, with its own separate grammar.

Impact on publishing

A fundamental corollary of a grammatical approach is that it makes it possible to seamlessly translate the multiplicity of data emerging from the excavation into a complex interplanar digital publication that affects all aspects of the excavation process. We will discuss this briefly below.

One particular aspect of the grammar as proposed here is the inclusion of conservation and site presentation within the publishing strategy. This is possible because of the application of a uniform grammatical approach to these aspects of fieldwork, to be implemented at the very moment of excavation.

Archaeological “grammars”

This grammar deals only with “archaeology” as it relates to excavation in a strict sense, i. e., the grammar of contextual excavation and typology. This is the one aspect that is exclusive to archaeology, whereas the study of material culture independently of its original context depends on methods developed in the study of history, art, architecture, and such.

We will address below the issue of the various archaeologies and relative grammars that more closey relate top the epistemic dimension here under consideration.