Archaeology

Giorgio Buccellati – July 2026

“Archaelogy”

Literally, the term refers to the way in which we “speak” (-logy) about “antiquity” (archaeo-), s with words like “theology” or “sociology.”

But “speaking” entails a form of knowledge: it refers, in other words, to an epistemic process: how do we know the object about which we are speaking?

This object of knowledge is generally understood to be what we have considered as broken traditions: we speak about an antiquity which is detached from our experience. Ii is in this sense that “archaeology” differs, in common understanding, from “history,” which deals instead with a past with which we can more easily identify.

The five epistemics

We may distinguish five different ways in which we “know” these broken traditions. In other words, we “know” in different ways depending on both the object and the approach. These five epistemics constitute, therefore, five different archaeologies, which may be described briefly as follows.

(1) Outer view of a site

An ancient site or monument may be viewed from the outside, without any excavation

desultory, superficial, firsthand, direect. immediate, first impression,Pre-excavation, Impressionistic

holistic, outer view

Anyone “knows” a site even before excavation: it is the most generic and least differentiated epistemic confrontation.

1. At the excavation moment, data are confronted in a disaggregate state, with discrete elements embedded in an amorphous mass. These elements must be disengaged from a context that for the most part was not built up intentionally.

(2) Non-contextual excavation

(3) Contextual excavation and typology

excav + typology

We , through excavation first and then through an assessment of what has been extricated from the ground.

If we take archaeology to refer, in a strict sense, to the excavation of a matrix that includes a multitude of fragments, sometimes preserved in their original aggregation (as with a burial), but for the most part disjointed from each other, we have by definition a body of data that is no longer part of a living tradition that can interpret the data for us.

Stricto sensu, the term assumes excavation as the primary epistemic goal, a process which archaeology shares with no other discipline. It is on the basis of such prior stratigraphic analysis that the subsequent step of typological analysis is taken, a process that is shared with a number of other disciplines.

A Mesopotamian “tell” like Urkesh is a prime example of a setting to which stratigraphic analysis applies. There was no standing monument visible when excavations started, and most likely none had been in view for some three millennia. Only a few surface sherds gave us a clue as to the potential occupational periods, plus two objects that had been sold on the market and could be assumed to come from the site.

(4) Typological analysis

Lato sensu, the term does not include stratigraphic analysis. It starts directly with the task of typological analysis.

This applies to standing monuments as diverse as Stonehenge, the pyramids or the Colosseum, and to objects that were not excavated with proper archaeological method and in the best of cases are housed in museums.

Besides excavation, we confront structures that stand on their own out of the soil, retaining their own original integrity, however fragmentary this may be; and objects that have either been preserved outside of any original context, or have been extracted from their context without regard for the context itself.

(5) Study of the past

= history, but differs because it is generally understood

Foucault’s “L’archéologie du savoir”

“Foucault calls this approach “archaeology” to emphasize that it uncovers the historical “layers” and rules that organize what can be said in a given period, rather than tracing continuous development of concepts or the intentions of individual authors. The work aims to define the objects, concepts, and procedures of this archaeological analysis and to distinguish it from more traditional approaches to texts, such as hermeneutics, intellectual biography, or the history of doctrines.

Archaeology thus distances itself from interpretive traditions that aim to recover a deeper, underlying truth of a text.

Change is described not as the gradual evolution of ideas but as a transformation in the rules that define what counts as a valid statement or a legitimate object of inquiry. This emphasis on discontinuity aligns with broader twentieth-century critiques of teleological history, while giving them a distinctive methodological articulation.

some readers hold that Foucault’s emphasis on anonymous rules eliminates agency, while others see The Archaeology of Knowledge as a preliminary step toward a more complex account of subject formation in his later work.

Source: “the-archaeology-of-knowledge” - Philopedia Read more: https://philopedia.org/works/the-archaeology-of-knowledge/