RECORD \ GLOBAL RECORD \ 85-02
1: G. Buccellati, December 2005

The five frames of reference

Introduction
The primary frame: excavation units
The intermediate frame: topical and typological areas
The broad frame: Mozan sitewide
The all-encompassing frame: the Urkesh website
ADD -- The wider domain: Cybernetica Mesopotamica

Introduction

four levels of presentation
access levels

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The primary frame: excavation units

     The main goal of the individual digital books of the UGR is to give the full details, in an atomistic fashion, of the pertinent excavation units. No single horizontal exposure can generally be fully understood by itself in its depositional and functional characteristics, nor can the sequence of phases exhaust the chronological questions without the benefit of the information coming from adjacent excavation units.
     Now, the goal of the UGR is precisely to provide the full emplacement record of the elements as originally found in the ground. The goal, in other words, is not to eschew heterogeneity if that means safeguarding the accuracy of the orignal observations.
     And yet, the goal is at the same time to inscribe these atomistic observatinos within an overall interpretive framework that offers the excavators' synthetic understanding of the myriad pieces of evidence. This is accomplished in three ways.
     First, the disconnected observations are reconfigured in a coherent narrative at the level of the analytical presentation.
     Second, a synthetic section in the left hand side vertical bar of the UGR page layout describes in a discursive way the inner coherence as seen by the excavators.
     Third, each individual digital book is integrated in the progressively broader frames that deal with typological areas, with the site as a whole, and with the overarching website.
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The intermediate frame: typological areas

synthesis
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