Anyone has an immediate relationship to the archaeological data in what we may call their raw state. We see an inscribed clay tablet and we know it contains a message, even if do not know what the message is.
There is then a mediated relationship, mediated, that is, through a process that requires an expertise that goes beyond the immediacy of this site or this object.
In so doing, we come to identify how the material record, as such, may have a deeper meaning that points to values, which is what we may recognize as being the proper task of hermeneutics, a task which we may see under three aspects.
- Heritage. –When we say that we inherit the past we mean something more than knowing about things (through epistemics). We claim that we can make them ours. That is what heritage means: to absorb as ours a reality that might otherwise remain just theirs, the ancients’.
- Appropriation. – But heritage does not come automatically. It has to be earned. That happens through a process of osmosis, whereby we identify with values that motivated human experience, so as to “appropriate” that past experience.
- Grammar. – The appropriation process must ultimately depend on grammar. Hermeneutics does not fall within its purview and as such it is not part of our Grammar. But grammar provides the essential guide for an objective approach to the otherwise mute witness of archaeological data.
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