Acquiring knowledge

Giorgio Buccellati – March 2026

The organization and articulation of knowledge, discussed in Part 1, provides a scheme within which the data are to be placed as they are being recovered.

“Data recovery” is, in fact, a special and unique dimension of archaeology. The excavation moment conditions the very nature of the data, and for this reason it must be fully inscribed in the grammatical approach.

This second part of the Epistemics section describes this approach in detail, with regard to the two basic processes that guide

the extraction or disentanglement of the data from the matrix of the soil, and
their subsequent being properly understood or structured on the basis of patterns of cooccurrence of shared traits.

The epistemic framework is shown in the chart.

	PROCESS	CONTEXT	METHOD
2. Acquiring knowledge	Disentangling	the matrix	Stratigraphy
				Space: Emplacement Volumetry
				Time: Deposition Chronometry
	Structuring	wholes	Typology
			Integrative

I will give below a concise definition of each category, a fuller definition being given under each heading in the rest of the Grammar.