“Towards a Linguistic Model for Archaeology,”
Revue d’assiriologie et d’archéologie orientale 106, 37-43.
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Archaeological theory (described in the first section of this paper) is here understood on the basis of a philosophical and linguistical approach, after many studies on this topic and the definition of a ‘contextual archaeology’ by I. Hodder [see e.g. Hodder and Hutson, on CAR website, by Marco De Pietri] and the perspective of cognitive sciences (C. Renfrew) [see e.g. Renfrew, on CAR website, by Giacomo Fornasieri].
The pivotal concept explored in this paper is indeed that of ‘broken tradition’ [see G. Buccellati, on CAR website; cf. G. Buccellati, Dal Profondo]: “We deal with cultures for which there are no living carriers, hence no competence with regard to self-understanding. Since hermeneutic canons presuppose continuity of experience and of expression, we must focus more directly on matters of method, in an effort to establish objective criteria that may allow us to overcome the ‘brokenness’ of the tradition” (p. 37).
This concept, when applied to the archaeological field, hints to the creation of a new method, namely the ‘grammar of the archaeological record‘, created and defined by the author of the present contribution: “The complexity of the archaeological record is compounded by the enormous quantity of data excavated. Both aspects are ideally dealt with through digital applications that emphasize the method more than the technique. The method I propose is a grammatical one, in the sense of a closed syntactical and syntagmatic categorization system that allows statements of predictability and of non-occurrence” (p. 37).
After this introduction, the author presents two ‘itineraries’ (section 1, pp. 37-38) in the archaeological thought: the first one, before the 1960es, focused on theoretical aspects of the discipline; after 1960, archaeology benefited of some linguistic patterns of interpretation which were applied for the first time also to archaeology.
Section 2, on pp. 38-39, describes the introduction in archaeology of some scientific techniques of analysis, such as the radiocarbon (William Libbi, 1949), the GIS system and the 3D renderings of archaeological remains. Nevertheless, the author stresses how this ‘extrinsicism’ does not supply enough the scope of the archaeological interpretation: anthropology, geology, ethnography, aesthetic, history and cognitive sciences are always a basic and unavoidable step of the archaeological interpretation.
Section 3 (p. 39) further faces the aforementioned problem of ‘interpreting interpretation‘, moving to an epistemological definition of archaeology as a science. This epistemological question directly involves the topic of ‘hermeneutics’ (see mostly Buccellati 2017, complemented by CAR website), which covers the second section of the paper.
Section 4 (pp. 39-40) displays two dilemmas: 1) “the process of data acquisition is very distinctive in archaeology because of the wholly fluid nature of the data: these are not, in the first instance, the items in themselves (as one might think at first: a statue here, a cuneiform tablet there). What there is, instead, is the way in which everything is placed in the ground, in an amorphous matrix that has been created, and defined, by the process of deposition”; 2) “emerging from the ground, archaeological data have the singular opacity of being outside the living stream of tradition. The primary link we have is simply that they belong to a human tradition. Otherwise, we are pretty much like ‘anthropologists on Mars’ [see Buccellati 2006] to quote the way an autistic person described herself, with reference to the fact that she could not internalize normal human emotions and had instead to develop a ‘library’ of symptoms that would trigger given preset responses” (pp. 39-40).
Section 5 (p. 40) further investigates the topic of the ‘hermeneutic of stratigraphy’: archaeological data are not ‘data’ [on this topic, see M. De Pietri, in CAR] and they need an interpretation based on an hermeneutical approach which involves the concept of ‘empathy’ [on this topic, see e.g. A. Bezzera, in CAR] of the archaeologist as interpreter (or translator) of ancient remains in our modern canons or thoughts: “So, in a very basic sense, the hermeneutics of stratigraphy means that we must repeat the experiment of excavation by retracing the steps of the excavators (we’ll never be able to repeat the excavation as such). We must define, more systematically than is the case at present, the canons of emplacement interpretation, showing then how from it we can expand our analysis to deposition, function, and all the higher levels of meaning” (p. 40).
Section 6 (pp. 40-41) deals with the ‘hermeneutics of broken tradition‘: “The simple basic question then is: can we reach for it, as we must if we aim for its interpretation? Can we reach behind and beyond the breakage, and inspect, meta-hermeneutically as it were, not just the elements as reinserted in our tradition, but also as they were in their anterior existence? I claim that this approach is possible, with a singularity that belongs exclusively to archaeology, but to which I would like to adapt a linguistic model (p. 41).
The last section of the paper involves the ‘secret kinship‘, a concept explaining how modern people (archaeologists as human beings) can afford the interpretation and ‘re-presentation’ (i.e. the description in the present of a phaenomenon of the past); the three basic steps are presented in sections 7-9, respectively: 1) the need for a ‘grammar’ (see supra) implying a ‘digital thought‘; 2) the “perceptual trigger”, i.e. the mechanism leading to regain “a perception that was sought, and that found its fulfillment in the actuality of a physical world. Our excavations can aim to recreate the same perceptual context. In this sense, the perception of the built environment is like the vanishing point in perspective” (p. 42); 3) the ‘Hermeneutics (with capital H) of archaeology’, a conceptual system in which the archaeological knowledge is perceived as not a mere, mechanic technique of excavation, but as a complex network of interrelate disciplines aiming at revitalizing the actual nature of ancient people’s perspective on the world.