Archaeology: contextual or stratigraphic

Giorgio Buccellati – August 2026

The stratigraphic context

There is a context to any of the five types of archaeology: thus the landscape is the context within which the outer view of a site takes shape; and the typological comparison among objects provides a context for antiquarian archaeology.

But stratigraphy plays a unique role in defining what we may call “contextual” archaeology. Here the context is understood in a strict sense as referring to the notion that the data derive their primary identification from their tie to place, in a way that is not found in any other type of context.

We must accordingly distinguish two factors that define this context, the matrix and the elements (see below for a fuller, operational description of stratigraphy).

Matrix

What we face on an excavation, when the spade first hits the ground is a concretion of material. It is an amorphous mass where the soil serves as a binding that contains discrete elements, some of which appear at times to be preserved in their original aggregation (as with a burial), but are otherwise and for the most part disjointed from each other.

Elements

As the individual elements emerge, they exhibit a typological identity which now provides them, once extracted from the mstrix, an identity which is added to the one tied to the finding spot.

Contextuality

The notion of stratigraphic context refers to the fact that, even with this additional typological identity, their full identity depends ultimately on their tie to place. A ceramic vessel found in the ground is immediately recognizable as such, and it appears accordingly as belonging to a easily definable formal type (a jar, a bowl, etc.). But its dating, its function, even its symbolic value – hence its full identity – depends on the physical context, i. e., the matrix, where it had come to rest in antiquity. This is the task of contextual archaeology.

The primacy of contextual archaeology

This is what I consider to be the primary epistemic system, and the one with which this grammar is properly concerned.

I am making the case that archaeology based on contextual excavation and correlative typology is the only epistemic dimension that is uniquely distinctive of archaeology vis-à-vis any other discipline, and thus the one that is properly the object of this grammar.

Stricto sensu, the term assumes excavation as the primary epistemic goal, a process which archaeology shares with no other discipline. It is on the basis of such prior stratigraphic analysis that the subsequent step of typological analysis is taken, the latter being a process that is shared with a number of other disciplines.

A Mesopotamian “tell” like Urkesh is a prime example of a setting to which stratigraphic analysis applies. There was no standing monument visible when excavations started, and most likely none had been in view for some three millennia. Only a few surface sherds gave us a clue as to the potential occupational periods, plus two objects that had been sold on the market and could be assumed to come from the site.

Grammar

Any professional excavation aims, in one way or another, to understand the context: this is subsumed under the conceot of stratigraphy. The grammar proposed in this digital book develops this notion in full, integrating other elements into a complex unitary view of contextual excavation at its best.