The concept

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Introduction

The term “stratigraphy” is ubiquitous in archaeological discourse, but the concept is not generally as rigorously defined as one might wish. In a loose sense, it is often used to refer to a variety of concrete field situations where different elements overlay or intersect each other. At its simplest, one thinks of layers that are horizontally placed one on top of the other, and a layer cake is the most commonly used metaphor for this situation.

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Emplacement and deposition

In point of fact, the situation is generally more complex, and, even more importantly, one must more sharply differentiate between the two constitutive aspects of stratigraphy, emplacement and deposition.

These two aspects interact with each other as, respectively, the static and the dynamic moments of one and the same situation. They describe the elements as found in terms of how they relate to each other, in two regards:

• emplacement is static because it refers to the collocation of things in the ground.
  As such, it deals with space.
• deposition is dynamic because it refers to the process whereby such collocation is inferred to have come into existence.
  As such, it deals with time.
  
  

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Volumetry and chronometry

Another fundamental aspect pertains to the way in which we can dimension both emplacement and deposition. This refers to the nature of measurements we can overlay on the data: volumetry and chronometry.

• volumetry dimensions things as they are placed in measurable volumes – in space;
• chronometry dimensions things as they are are seen to impact each other – in time.

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Summary

The following chart summarizes the relative aspects of emplacement and deposition on the one hand, and of volumetry and sequencing on the other (the numbers refer to the order in which they are treated below):

A full discussion of the concept of stratigraphy as used in the Urkesh Global Record is found in Chapter 5 of the Grammar (cf. also the companion website CAR). Here, only a few key points are summarized to help understand the presentation of the data.