The concept of site presentation

It is the archaeologists' privilege to intuit beneath the surface the life that bustled in ancient times before a site came to be covered under its own collapse. And it is their task to disengage the ruins from the matrix that has engulfed them for centuries. It should be their task as well to provide, with a full measure of control, a sense of the life behind the ruins. The life that provided coherence to the site as a human construct should be our guiding light in discovering the coherence of the fragments that are now left in the ground.
Such is not an ambition that is shared by most field archaeologists. More than as an intellectual task, site presentation (when it is undertaken at all) is viewed as a reconstruction that follows, chronologically and conceptually, the excavation moment. At Tell Mozan we have instead endeavored to achieve full integration between these two tasks, excavation and presentation, viewing the two in a polarity that is intrinsic to each and must govern the operations of both.