Back to top: A tie to place
The concept
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. An archaeologcial element of material culture is tied to space in the more specific sense that its identity rests on that tie.
No doubt, a cuneiform tablet can claim identity as, precisely, a cuneiform tablet, that has a certain physical appearance, a recognizable type of script, a readable text of, let us say, an administrative nature, etc. But upstream of all that, there is the place where it first appeared: its primary identity has to do with the fact that it laid 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…, etc. etc.
Back to top: A tie to place