Archaeology: the outer view

Giorgio Buccellati – May 2026

(1) Outer view

Anyone “knows” a monument standing as a ruin, a site that needs excavation, an ancient artifact: it is the most generic and least differentiated epistemic confrontation. A hill that is known to hide an ancient settlement (tell Mozan), a structure so badly damaged that it is only a shadow of its former self (the Colosseum), a cuneiform tablet or a Greek amphora – they are all viewed from the outside, in their current state. It is a “superficial” epistemic confrontation, meaning that the element is seen in its surface appearance, without any meaningful insight into the wider frame of reference which lends it depth and substance.

There are two ways of confronting the building or the object, depending on whether or not the appearance of the element results from excavation.

(1) No excavation: we face a standing monument that has not been in use for a long time, or else an object that floats, through an untold story, out of its original context.

(2) Excavation is the process through which we confront discrete elements embedded within an amorphous mass. As we do this, we disengage a context – and the decisive question is whether or not we seek to define the context. A contextual excavation is the proper mark of archaeology, and we will look at it next. A non-contextual excavation is of two types:

An accidental non contextual excavation is generally limited in time and scope, and does not result in any major exposure.
An intentional non contextual excavation aims to extract individual elements for their own sake, as if items in a safe that has contained them for their intrinsic value. It is the hallmark of looting, an archaeology of sorts, detrimental for the loss of context it causes and formally illegal.

“Grammar”

A grammar is the tool of choice for an epistemic analysis of any body of data. It defines an organism in terms of how it is known: seeing an object as an organic set of entities and relationships, it translates this set into an organic epistemic structure, i. e., a structure that reflects how we know that body of data. In other terms, grammar defines the parameters of knowledge: wherever there is knowledge, there is grammar.

If reduced to a set of rules and instructions, grammar is then seen merely, with regard to archaeology, as an operational manual. It is instead, much more meaningfully, the method through which we can articulate in an organic way our knowlegde of archaseology, or, rather, of the “five” archaeologies.

What is “grammar”

– presupposition of live language

in archaeology, a live tradition

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.

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

The limits of experience

hermeneutics

refr to appropriation

speaking a language vs. living a tradition

Here, too, the tradition is broken, but not dead

On this see Critique, articles

The object in its present state develops as if an identity of its own, a disembodied reality that acquires a new body, one that is disengaged from its original setting and, in a way, proposes a new authenticity that replaces the search for the live dimension in which the object was originally situated.

(1) Outer view

Even a first impression approach to one or more archaeological sites entails a grammar, in a variety of shades. A scholar would have assumptions about issues like the nature and the time of occupation, based on a variety of clues, such as surface finds or information from other sources.

People living in the territory would develop a general notion about the site(s) hiding ancient settlement(s) or monument(s) in plain view. Their grammar may elaborate and introduce interpretive elements, some even based on fantasy. Some elements might be exploited for ideological and political purposes such as, for example, with the Roman “fasces” (a bundle of rods with an axe, emblem of the power of punishment) as used by Fascism

it is the mystique fo the “ruins”, Piranesi

No Ruz in Mozan

lions of Tish-atal

game “digs” for children are actually encuraging this approach