Referentiality

Giorgio Buccellati – January 2026

The concept

Any element we find today in the ground referred in the past to a specific dimension in the life of its users: a house was a home for certain individuals; a grave was recognized as a rsting place for deceased members of a given family; a certain vessel was used exclusively for divinatory purposes; and so on. Each element carried a specific meaning, known to the living carriers of that cultural tradition.

But, as found by us in the ground, archaeological data bear little or no direct evidence to such reference. A wall or a sherd can be identified as artifacts, i. e., as something made for a given use. But the degree of referentiality is at first limited to just that definition: a mudbrick wall or a ceramic sherd.

Our epistemic process aims to recover as full a referential dimension as possible and, to this effect, we may distinguish the following degrees of referentiality.

Morphology: no referentiality

The grammar operates with criteria that are assumed to reflect categories not operative as such for the ancients. For example, the color of a ceramic sherd, its ware, its dimensions are defined in our grammar by categories that are extraneous to the ancient mindset: the metric scale (as in the drawing to the right), the Munsell color system, a chemical definition, etc.

What is non-referential is our classificatory system: it would not be recognized by the ancients. Thus the drawing of the sherd to the right, which follows our documentary standars, would in effect be incomprehensible to them.
This does not obviously mean that the ancients had no awareness of dimensions, color, ware; only that our "grammar" is structurally different. It operates on the basis of a metrical precision (for dimensions), codification system (for colors), chemical principles (for wares), that are all extraneous to the mindset of the ancients, and do not take that mindset into account.

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Semiotics

Semiotics sees the elements of language as signs of equivalent elements in reality. For example, a word refers to a specific object (say, a drinking cup), a sentence refers to a specific process (a request for pouring a drink in the cup).

In linguistics, there are three major branches of semiotics: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. They may be seen to apply, in a derivative sort of way, to archaeological epistemics, and we may do this by pointing to three distinct ways in which the referent may be situiated.

1. Syntax: context referentiality

An assemblage of conical cups

2. Semantics: observer’s referentiality

We can hold in one hand a whole ceramic object like the one shown on the right, we can pour liquid in it and drink from it. These inferences may be regarded as obvious, and are formulated as soon as the cup appears – including our term "cup" which is already referential, and thus "semiotic" in nature. The object is referentially present to us as it was to the ancients, and in this case the language equivalence applies properly (e. g., Akkadian kāsu ~ English "cup").

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3. Pragmatics: user’s referentiality

What emotional response would the object evoke in the subject holding it? Two seal impressions give us a clue: a cup is held in one hand by the king in one case and by the queen in the other, in a scene that indicates conviviality but points also to a special celebratory atmosphere. This takes us closer to the perception that the ancients had of this item – being used for ceremonial occasions, when the cup acquired a special meaning, to the point of being rendered several times on the seals of queen Uqnitum.
See also below under Hermeneutics.

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-etic and -emic

The distinctions made above with regard to referentiality reflect in part the distinction between -etic and -emic approaches, where the latter implies a culture specific understanding and definition of phenomena, and the former does not (or rather, it is specific to our culture, not to the target culture). See below

Awareness.

Magritte

Everaert-Desmedt, Nicole, éditeur. Magritte au risque de la sémiotique. Presses universitaires Saint-Louis Bruxelles, 1999, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pusl.19600.