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A tie to place
Any element of material culture is tied to place: a house stands on a plot of land; a painting hangs in a mUseum; and so on. An archaeological element of material culture is tied to space in the more specific sense that its identity rests on that tie.
No doubt, a cuneiform tablet can claim identity as, precisely, a cuneiform tablet, that has a certain physical appearance, a recognizable type of script, a readable text of, let us say, an administrative nature, etc. But upstream of all that, there is the place where it first appeared: its primary identity has to do with the fact that it laid on the floor of a room, as part of an accumulation that included other tablets and a variety of ceramic vessels, the room being in turn part of a larger building associated with…, etc. etc.
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The “stratigraphic” context
This association with space may be define as “stratigraphic” in nature, a term which requires an explanation.In principle, stratigraphy refers to a series of strata , each relating to the other in terms of contact associations and inferred temporal sequence.
The concept may be extended to include the surface context as a single stratum. We may call this “stratum zero.”
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