The global record

Giorgio Buccellati – November 2024

The need for a global record

The need for a global record arises from the considerations about grammar: for the grammar to have full validity, it needs to be applied to the entirety of the available data, since a selective approach would skew the conclusions in favor of the criteria that have operated upstream of the analysis, and thus condition its results. This results in a new type of archaseological publication.

The current publication standard

Typically, excavation reports may be said to fall into two categories.

Preliminary reports:. – These tend to be tied to the excavation process, hence to the units that have been opened during a given season; additionally, they describe the major movable finds from the whole season. They are generally short, and very selective in their coverage.
Final reports. – These are tied to a typological understanding of the architecture and of the movable finds. They are more comprehensive, but still selective in the documentation.

The Urkesh global record

The Urkesh Global Record aims to resolve the problems just mentioned, in terms of both documentation and publication. We may say that the legacy is the publication. The initial record is published as such: however, it it so structured that the result is not a mere cumulation of scattered elements, but a coherent whole that develops a series of proper arguments.

It is emphatically not selective, both at the origin (how it is made) and at its publication (how it is presented).

It is global as to observers. – All participants are required to record their observations, whether they bring a long experience to the process or have little or no training.
It is global as to observations. – Every single observation that is ever made with regard to the stratigraphy of the excavated record is retained. Even observations which eventually appear to be “wrong”, are all retained.
It is structured as a publication. – Observations are entered from the moment they are made into a digital record that follows a precise grammar, uniformly used by all participants in the recording process (from the excavator to the photographer). In other words, the record is neither selective nor heterogeneous.
It combines data base and argument. – The data and the relative observations are accessible as a database, but they are also presented within a discursive framework that develops an argument, according to a format that is discussed below.
It is always final. – Since nothing relating to the excavation process is ever removed, the data as entered on a daily basis constitute at all times a final publication. This does not apply to the synthetic portion of the website,