Legacy

Giorgio Buccellati – December 2025

The notion of legacy

An increasing number of research projects is focusing on the study of original excavation records, seeking to extract from them information that did not make it into the original reports (for an important recent contribution to this topic see Raja 2023 ; De Benedictis). This recognizes the importance and, in a sense, the primacy of the excavation unit as the place and the moment when the primary record is brought to light.

But there are two major problems.

Even the original records tend to be very selective. They generally consist of journal entries that describe in a synthetic view hte results of a given day of excavation. Even when they are extensive, they remain essentially synthetic summaries that reflect the final understanding by the writer and, through that, the macro-strategy that was aimed at implementing the intial research design.
They are generally written by the director of the excavation, including at times one or more assistants. This means that they do not cover the entirety of the observations made by each and everyone of the participants in the excavation, omitting in particular decisions that guided the process at a micro-strategic level.

The excavation record

The growing interst in legacy provides, if indirectly, a recognition of value of excavation record as the objective archaeological data. This is in line with the goals of the “global record” – but of course the record accessible to legcy studies is far from being “global.” It typically includes the best known part of the record, i. e., structures and objects, with a few notes on their stratigraphic context, but little more. So the recognition of the value of the excavation record is only implicit.

Our own “legacy”

In a sense, our own delayed work may be considered a legacy effort. There are three types of such (internal) “legacy” work.

(1) The final publication is done by the person who was in charge of the excavations as unit director see J5 for an example.

(2) The final publication is curated by a staff person who did not personally work in that unit, or at least was not the unit director in charge. example

(3) The final coordination of the publication is done by someone who never took part in the excavations at Tell Mozan (see for example the case of A6). This will become more frequent as we get to publish the older excavation units, and in this connection, see below in the section about the operational frame.