Structuring: wholes

Giorgio Buccellati – October 2025

From fragments to wholes

The disentangling of the matrix, whch we have seen to be the hallmark of the stratigraphic process, extracts elements which are fragments of larger wholes, wholes that are not immediately apparent in the stratigraphic record. What is required next is a structuring process that identifies these wholes.

We deal here with a semiotic dimension, one that aims to replicate the semiotics of the ancients on the basis of objective patterned correlations of formally defined (hence, grammatical) traits. The ancients dealt with wholes, not with fragments – the grammar guides us in identifying these meaningful wholes, by allowing us to establish patterned correlations among formal traits.

Types of “wholeness”

There are different types of “wholes,” and the images below provide two examples.

An aggregate: burial A8a8
An assemblage: 23 selected conical cups

The tomb on the left is a whole as it is found in the ground: a coherent structure, partly damaged (the vertical bricks that formed the top have fallen in), but with its original content still in place: the brick structure, a skeleton, individual offerings, accumulations that derive from the collapse of the roof.

The image on the right represent a whole as restructured by us, a collection of items that share the same attributes, which we call conical cups. These particular twenty-three cups were never seen together in antiquity: they have been put together by us from a variety of different places and strata, but we can be confident that they would be recognized as a coherent “collection” by an ancient in the same way we do – because of the objective nature of the formal traits they share.

The grammar

Epistemics gives us the tools for translating the complex physical record that emerges from the excavations onto a "known" referential record.
What results is a structured universe, which can, to some extent, claim to reflect the semiotic universe of the ancients.

	PROCESS	CONTEXT	METHOD
2. Acquiring knowledge	Structuring	wholes
			Typology	Morphology Built environment Objects
				Semiotics Chronology Function

Process: structuring

The structuring process consists in identifying the structural wholes. Given the patterned regularity of identifiable formal traits, we may reasonably infer that these wholes were perceived as such (i. e.,as a tomb or as a distinctive assemblage of cups) by the ancients in a way that parallels our own perception of the same elements.

The validity of the process depends on the quality of the formal system of definitions, and on the accuracy with which the system is applied.

Context: wholes

A structural whole is exemplified in the two types mentiond above, the tomb and the conical cups. The main difference between the two rests on how each relates to place, and in this regard we distinguish between the two by defining one as an aggregate and the other as an assemblage (see already in the section on constituents).

Aggregate. – The tomb is a stationaty element, meaning that its identity is tied to the place where it is found. Qua aggregate, the tomb is present to us in the same way it was to the ancients: it comes to us already “structured,” since we recognize the aggregate semiotically as a tomb. It is an original whole.
Assemblage. – The conical cups are movable items, meaning that their identity is not tied to place. While this particualr collection never existed in antiquity, it is plausible to assume that it would be recognized as a whole by an ancient the same way we do. It is a whole which we have structured, and which can be said to have a legitimate semiotic valence. In other words, an assemblage is a derived whole.

It follows that there can be an assemblage of aggregates: thus several tombs that share the same traits as the one in our example would constitute such an assemblage.

Method: typology

The individual elements within an assemblage are seen to share formal traits, so that they form classes of elements. The notion of structuring refers to these classes, which are structural entities independent of their stratigraphic location, but grounded in the objective attributes that make it a proper epistemic reality.

The essence of the structuring method lies in the clustering of data according to both intra- and extra-referential formal traits.

Morphology. – The first criterion looks at data depending on their intrinsic qualities: we construct typologies on the basis of inner-referential attributes, i. e., attributes that refer exclusively to the data as such, e. g., shape or material for ceramics, iconography for glyptics, paleography or linguistic analysis for texts.
Semiotics .– The second criterion looks at the data in terms of their interaction with other data that are not morphologically similar and are drawn from a broader context, using a variety of extra-referental attributes such as the comparison with data from other excavated sites; the analysis of materials with techniques like radiocarbon dating; confrontation with the broader historical framework as defined by textual data.