“Archaeology”

Giorgio Buccellati – July 2026

A definition

Etymologically, the term “archaeology” refers to the way in which we “speak” (-logy) about an object that is generally uderstood as “ancient” (archaeo-) – just as “theology” refers to speaking about god, “sociology” about society, “epistemology” about knowledge.

The term refers, in other words, to both the sources (“ancient”) and the way we know them (“epistemics”).

We should further define these two terms, looking at them first in terms of the conventional current understansing..

Ancient (“archaeo-“)

By “ancient” one generally refers to what I call a broken tradition, an antiquity detached from our experience. for which there are no living carriers. It is in this sense that “archaeology” differs, in common understanding, from “history,” which includes a past with which we can more easily identify.

Epistemics (“-logy”)

“Speaking” entails a form of knowledge. It refers, in other words, to an epistemic process: how do we process the sources we have (“ancient”) so as to know the object about which we are speaking? How do these sources become part of our knowledge system?

For a grammatical definition

For our purposes, we need to define the concept more precisely. This means that both the notions of “ancient” and of “epistemics” have to be re-calibrated according to the notions of stratigraphy and of grammar, respectively.

Ancient

An essential dimension is that the “ancient data” be elements of material culture in their stratigraphic context. We must recognize, in other words, that the primary identity of these elements is tied to place. This entails a highly specific concept of what the “sources” are: they are not just things in themnselves, but things in close physical association with other things.

Epistemics

There are accordingly two main levels at which archaeological epistemics operates: the study of the associations in space, and the study of classes of elements as they can be identified in the corpus.

Definition

We may thus formulate a definition of archaeology stricto sensu as the grammatical study of broken traditions as found in a stratigraphic context.

Parallel epistemics

There are different, and parallel, epistemics that deal in similar ways with the ancient data as just defined. There are, in other words, different archeologies that fit the definiton just given. The one that comes closest may be called “contextual archaeology”; but they all, if with a more limited scope, approach the data with a view towards their stratigraphic setting. We will deal with them separately in the following section on archaeologies.