Website overview

Giorgio Buccellati – January 2025

Preliminaries

The contents of this section follow a format that is similar for all websites in the system, described in UGR website:

Introduction

A general presentation of the contents of the website.

Epistemics

This is the major section of the Grammar. It deals with how knowledge of the archaeological data, as found in the ground, are processed.

Organizing

The constituents are the building blocks of the system, and they are defined by sets of reciprocal oppositions.

The specifics of what each constituent actually is are found in a categorization system that defines variables and variants.

A particular aspect of the archaeological record is the close interaction between the constituents and the archive structure.

The details for a hands-on operation of the system are given in the Digital Operation Manual.

Acquiring

The archaeological referential record, i. e., the record as grammaticalized, is established through two main processes:

the disentangling of the data from the matrix of the soil, as they are found in their disaggregated state;
the structuring of the data into assemblages independently of the excavation process.

Conveying

This section describes briefly the relationship between the grammar and the final output as given in two types of publication:

the re-structuring of some selected wholes that are preserved physically at the site and presented to visitors;
the re-configuration of the entire body of data as found, the “global record,” is given in the UGR system, while selected portions are covered in the printed publications.

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics may be seen as the search for meaning and for values: the knowledge which epistemics has articulated and conveyed is now received as a springboard for the appropriation of what stands behind the known, what triggered originally a response and can do so again for us today.

The role of hermeneutics at the time of excavation is limited, but important, and attention for the “inheritors” must be inscribed, however briefly, already at the level of grammatical analysis.

References

A list of the bibliographical references used in the text, with links to the places where they occur.