Preface

For full bibliographical information see Front Matter.

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“Grammar”

The concept of”grammar” entails more than a set of rules. It proposes a coherent and tightly knit organism, capable of accounting for the most minute of details while at the same time viewing the whole in its structural complexity. The linguistic model operates with a living organism, even with the so-called “dead” languages: Babylonian has not been spoken for more than two millennia, but it was a living organism and it still is so to the extent that we can retrieve it from the available texts.

We will look in some detail below at what the application of this concept entails.

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The “archaeological record”

In common practice, the term “record” has a double meaning when referring to archaeology:

• The physical record consists of the “things” as found, and then the things as preserved (when they are in fact preserved).
• The referential level consists of the documentary and interpretive frame within which the physical record is placed.
  
  

The grammar is the instrument that converts the record from a physical to a referential level (see below).

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Epistemics and hermeneutics

There are two major ways in which the archaeological referential level can be seen to function: the way the record is represented and the way it is appropriated. They can be seen and belonging respectively to epistemics and hermeneutics.

Epistemics refers to the articulation and conveyance of knowledge. The grammar is essentially an epistemic tool: as such, it takes up the articulation of the referential level of the record, with a description of the constituents and of the process through which they are obtained in the field. The grammar also deals briefly with the principles that underlie the conveyance aspect, to which other websites are otherwise specifically dedicated.

Hermeneutics refers to the way in which knowledge can be appropriated as a repository of meaning and a relayer of values. As such it does not properly belong in the grammar, but in the case of archaeology there is a closer association with the epistemic dimension, and this will be briefly explained in an apposite section.

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The two archaeologies

In current use, the term “archaelogy” has two parallel acceptations.

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, 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.

Lato sensu, the term does not include stratigraphic analysis. It starts directly with the task of typological analysis.

This applies to standing monuments as diverse as Stonehenge, the pyramids or the Colosseum, and to objects that were not excavated with proper archaeological method and in the best of cases are housed in museums.