Preface

For full bibliographical information see Front Matter.

When preparing for publication A Critique of Archaeological Reason it felt like walking along a double trajectory, that of theory and that of practice. In the preface (p. xiii) I wrote about “my long-standing confrontation with fieldwork and my ongoing reflection about it. It is the most concrete of situations, in which the urgency of practical matters and the scope of cultural results is often so daunting as to rob us of the mental space we need to reflect on theory. And yet reflect we must. […] It was also an ongoing process. The act of excavation had its own rhythm: one could not stop and get off. Thus the theoretical reflection had to proceed apace. What ensued was an intense cross-fertilization between practice and theory.” And I spoke (p. xiv) of “the conviction that abstraction, properly conceived, was on the side of concreteness.”

This cross-fertilization and this welding of abstraction and concreteness find their realization in this Grammar, which is like a counterpart of the theoretical essay given in the Critique. In turn, the Grammar is the entry way to the Urkesh Global Record: together, they show how to achieve the theoretical goals stated in the Critique.

The concept of a grammar entails more than a set of rules. It proposes a coherent and tightly knit organism, capable of accounting for the most minute of details while a the same time viewing the whole in its structural complexity. The linguistic model operates with a living organism, even with the so-called “dead” languages: Babylonian has not been spoken for more than two millennia, but it is a living organism to the extent that we can retrieve it from the available texts.

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. Hence their grammar must go through two intermediate steps, one that defines the “things” as found, the other that defines them in terms of their orignal function and thus re-aggregates them into wholeness. It is, we might say, a grammar at the power of two.

The quality of a grammar is judged in part by its “power,” i. e., the effectiveness with which it can, on the one hand, account for the data and, on the other, generate an appropriate output. 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, which correspond to the double nature of an archaeological grammar.

The actual process whereby the output presented here is generated from the data is omitted here. It represents an altogether different exercise from the utilization of the record, requiring as it does the application of specific input protocols and the running of a set of programs. The development of these protocols and the writing of the programs has occupied much of my effort, alongside the development of the theoretical framework embodied in the Grammar and the field work embodied in the current volume with the publication of a subset of the data.