Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati 2008

“The Ceramics of Urkesh: Statistics for a Browser Edition,”
in D. Bonatz et al. (eds.), Fundstellen Gesammelte Schriften zur Archäologie und Geschichte Altvorderasiens ad honorem Hartmut Kühne, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, pp. 315-326.

“An important goal of the Mozan/Urkesh Archaeological Project has been the development of an all-compassing system that builds up the record as an incremental whole. […] The digital dimension is enscribed in the record from the moment an observation is first made in the field” (p. 317).

Such a ‘digital thought’ [cf. also Buccellati 2017, chapter 4.11] is applied at Urkesh also on ceramic recording: such a system can help archaeologists only if a strict ‘grammar’ is applied in the recording; this coherent system led to the creation of a ‘digital database of pottery‘.

The aim of the team was that “to achieve the two complementary goals of a rigous preservation of every single atomistic observation on the one hand, and, on the other, to construct a meaningful and intuitive framework within which all the observations cohere” (p. 317).

Thus, the ‘Global Record’ [cf. also Buccellati 2006 (handout)] directly means and constitutes a ‘Browser Edition’ [cf. also Buccellati 2006].

The whole system consists of ‘minimal constituents’, ‘frequencies’ (with ‘single attributes’, and ‘multiple attributes’), ‘correlations’ (making possible to realize comparisons between units and between different shapes or accumulations within the same unit).

In the end: the ‘Urkesh Global Record’ [‘UGR‘] “is so designed to allow an organizational flow that maximizes the usefulness of the countless observations made during the process of excavation itself, and then during the follow-up analysis of the material” (p. 321).