The primacy of excavation units

Giorgio Buccellati – November 2024

see https://cyb-mes.net/2-UGR.htm#the-primacy-of-the-unit-books

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 notion of legacy

see primacy

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 Shaping Archaeological Archives). 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 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 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 assistant. 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 Urkesh global record

The Urkesh Global Record aims to resolve the problems I have 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).

The excavation unit

     The most important difference vis-à-vis the current standard is that we produce in effect a final publication of each excavation unit. What is normally reserved for a prelimnary report, and what is then produced in a truly "preliminary" manner, i. e., very selectively, is here given in full.
     It is in the form of a browser edition, hence not as either a data base or as a summary narrative. It contains the totality of the data as observed during the excavation, but in the form of a running argument tightly interwoven with the data.
     The excavation unit website is thus the building block of the entire system. Each unit website is tightly interrelated to each of thematic websites: these provide the synthetic interpretation at the sitewide level, and integrate the details of the unit websites into this larger picture.

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