Stratigraphy

Giorgio Buccellati – July 2026

A tie to place

Any element of material culture is tied to place: a house stands on a plot of land; a painting hangs in a museum; and so on. When I park a car and make note of the parking spot, I am anchoring the car to a given place, which I will find when I come back to look for the car.

An archaeological tie to place

An archaeological element of material culture is tied to space in the more specific sense that its primary identity rests on that tie. This depends on two factors.

Permanence

There is no permanence in a tie with place when the element in question belongs to a living tradition: a house may be remodeled, a painting may be moved, my tie with the place where I parked the car ends as soon as I set the car in motion and leave. In the case of an element of a living tradition, tie to place is in function of its use. The tie is limited in time at the discretion of the users.

An element from a broken tradition is no longer in use, and for this reason the tie with place claims permanence. An item encased in the matrix of the soil exhibits a permanent tie with the matrix and its identity is defined by that tie: the fact of being removed from its place is extraneous to its “identity.” I do not remove a sales contract inscribed on a cuneiform tablet because I need to show my claim to property, but only because I am interested in its connection with everything else found in the same context. Its primary “identity” rests on that connection with everything else, not on the terms of the contract even though they can still be read today as they could be read hundreds of years ago.

This is what we mean when we speak of fossils. A fossil is identified by the context in which it has been found, and into which it has been “frozen.” Its primary identity rests on the condition of “frozenness” which must be understood and defined while it is in its original setting.

Passivity

An element of material culture from a living tradition imposes identity on place. The basilica of St. Peter in Rome gives the square in front of it and the whole section of the city where it is found its identity. We may say that the church is active in projecting its identity on the place where it is found.

An element of material culture from a broken tradition, when viewed instead as tied to a place, is passive in front of it, in the sense that it receives its identity from place. The ziggurat of Ur is understood as a ziggurat because of the analysis of all that is associated with it in the place where it is found.

It goes without saying that the ziggurat of Ur, or the Colosseum in Rome, can in turn acquire a new identity, as targets of attention for visitors. In this case, their identity is “active” in the sense that it defines the place, rather than the other way around. But they are no longer elements of a broken tradition: hermeneutics has brought them back within the context of the modern living tradition, if with a very different “identity” than either had originally.

“Stratigraphy”: primary identity

Stratigraphy is the method that studies the primary identity of elements as tied to place. Etymologically it refers to a series of strata, each relating to the other in terms of contact associations and inferred temporal sequence.

It establishes a special type of archaeology and it entails a specific method, which shows how concretely one may come to know the original identity of an element seen as tied to place.

A “stratum zero”

We may extend the concept to include the surface context as a single stratum, or “stratum zero.” This concept, not current in archaeology, implies that the ground level itself is a stratum. Even an object found on the surface of a tell is deemed to belong to the occupational history of the site, and to that extent it may be considered as “stratified” (see Harris 1989, especially chapters 5 and 11)

The concept has significant implications: it means that elements may be anchored in space even when they are loose or free-standing. An object found on the surface of a tell (as at Mozan), a trackway of hominid footprints (as at Laetoli), the mural paintings in a cave (Chauvet) may be said to belong to a stratum zero.

Typology: secondary identity

It is apparent that any element recovered through stratigraphy has its own typological identity. Thus, a cuneiform tablet which has been identified stratigraphically with regard to the place where found (it was laying on the floor of a room, as part of an accumulation that included other tablets and a variety of ceramic vessels, the room being in turn part of a larger building associated with other buildings, thus datable to 1750 B.C., etc. etc.) must then be identified as a written document, having a certain physical appearance, a recognizable type of script, a readable text that gives the terms of a contract for the sale of land, etc. etc.

Typology is a specific method which provides a full measure of formal attributes describing the secondary identity independently of the primary.