Giorgio Buccellati, Critique of Archaeological Reason

Work in progress

Stefania Ermidoro, June 2015
Archaeology, History and Hermeneutics

  • How do they work?
         Archaeology: It works with no intermediaries
    "The recapturing of a broken tradition entails a kind of phenomenological epoché that proceeds along a quite independent path. It builds on a sample of data that is not filtered through conscious selection, through deliberate choices in function of a canon (more or less explicit), through the accretion of still growing self-awareness." (CAR 2.4)
         History: It can rely on a continuous tradition
    "Historical data have been handed down through a tradition that has been adding its own interpretive overlay just as it was preserving the original out of its intended context. Not so for archaeological "data": these are reproposed as wholly and permanently extruded." (CAR 18.2)

  • "Who" are their witnesses?
         Archaeology: Stratigraphy
    "A critical archaeological epistemology would instead start from within archaeological data as the essential presupposition of the possibility of knowledge. And yet it is precisely the uniqueness of these data, as discovered stratigraphically and as witnessing a broken tradition, that conditions knowledge in ways that are not found anywhere else." (CAR 16.13)
    "At the heart of the problem is the sharp realization of the total break in continuity of human traditions with which archaeological research is faced. On a daily basis, in a very practical way, the excavator dismantles a matrix which emerges as a mute witness to a life once lived, but now hardened into a disarray of fragments." (CAR 18.10)
         History: Several: Archaeology, Epigraphy, Oral tradition, Art...

  • How is their nature?
         Archaeology: Finite: An excavation can (should) be "closed"
         History: Non-finite: "Universal History"
    Braudel, Bloch: "La ricerca storica non ammette autarchia. La sola vera storia, che non può farsi se non con un aiuto reciproco, è la storia universale."
    Bloch: "Il passato è per definizione un dato non modificabile. Ma la conoscenza del passato è un processo in fieri, che si trasforma e si perfezione incessantemente."
    Braudel: "Above all, the two main feature of Braudel's are included in this text: firstly, the use of the longue durée approach against the the courte durée and the histoire événementielle, to stress the impact of the slow and somehow imperceptible effects of geographical, climatic, demographical, and technological factors on human societies."

  • Which level of Analysis do they represent?
         Archaeology: Grammar, Semiotics
         History: Hermeneutics
    "Hermeneutics seeks to establish the foundational criteria whereby meaning can be, arguably and legitimately, attributed to the data. In so doing, it goes well beyond a grammatical effort, beyond, that is, the definition of patterned regularities; and it goes beyond the semiotic effort, beyond, that is, the definition of the correspondence between the data as sign and meaning as the signified. Hermeneutics poses the question as to the very possibility of attributing meaning." (CAR 18.1)

  • Archaeology as a "prerequisite" of history:
         "Paradoxically, then, we may say that, often, the interpretive effort of even the best archaeological theory is not in fact "archaeological" in nature. The data are no longer seen in the fluid state intrinsic to their stratigraphic status, one that is consonant with the sensitivity of the deconstruction effort (see also 16.10.1). At this point, the interpretive reasoning abandons its archaeological prerogative, and, for all its sophistication, enters the realm of other intellectual domains, such as history or sociology, art criticism or phenomenology of religion." (CAR 16.12.2)
         Una volta costituita l'evidenza archeologica, allora può nascere l'inferenza che è identica all'analisi storica. Ma la peculiarità dell'archeologia è che essa studia qualcosa che è muto, molto più muto rispetto a quanto studiato dalla storia. Il dato archeologico prende voce solo attraverso un'analisi e delle tecniche che solo esclusivamente pertinenti all'archeologia.
         Bloch: "Il lavoro di ricomposizione, di visione d'insieme, è il prolungamento "naturale" dell'analisi, e la sua ragion d'essere. La delicata rete di relazione tra singoli elementi può manifestarsi solo quando i fatti siano stati classificati secondo la loro specifica natura."

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