Spring/Summer 1999
On April 27th, Professor Buccellati gave the 86th Faculty Research Lecture on "The Discovery of Ancient Urkesh and the Question of Meaning in Archaeology."	Faculty Profile Q & A with Giorgio Buccellati, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures What is the theme of your Faculty Research Lecture? What I find most significant about the very concept of the Faculty Research Lecture is the fact that one addresses very specifically the Academic Senate. The honor lies in being asked by your colleagues to speak primarily to them. In this respect it is unlike any other lecture I have given. I want to present the substantive results of the excavations, which are so rich and fascinating: I can draw on all that makes of archaeology the intended avocation, it seems, of half the world. This will be the easy part. I would also like to address the more complex intellectual issue of how we attribute meaning to what we find in the ground. Archaeology as the effort at recapturing a broken tradition: how do we re-embed it in our common human discourse? The identification of Urkesh, of any site, is a case in point. Any contact with this very name had been lost for some 3500 years. We can now attribute it to the remains buried under this particular hill. How does this affect our understanding of Hurrian history? Going into greater detail, this leads to more technical issues such as the ability to infer ethnic affiliation from archaeological remains. I hope I can weave my argument in such a way that it might convincingly emerge from the data as I present them. What do you judge to be the most lasting contributions to Ancient Near Eastern studies of the research that you and your wife, Dr. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati of California State University, Los Angeles, have undertaken in Syria? To me personally, the methodological concern for the theory of excavation and of stratigraphic analysis has been the major interest; I hope it will also be a lasting legacy. I am just now drawing the conclusions of many years of experimentation as I am preparing for publication a Grammar of the Stratigraphic Record, which will use as its data base our excavations at Urkesh (modern Tell Mozan). Having brought the first computer ever to be used for archaeological field work to Syria (in the late seventies), and having kept up to date with the development of the hard and software, I have become more and more concerned with the need to develop a grammatical understanding of the data as they come out of the ground. Publication of the stratigraphy must in fact be co-terminous with the moment of excavation: digital publishing rests not so much in the application of state-of-the-art technology to data, but rather in the theoretical articulation of the recovery process itself in such a way that the data are truly published when they first see the light. A digital format is almost accidental-the surface structure of the all-important deep structure in which the data are articulated. We have been producing CD's in the field, so far only for internal use, but, beginning this year, for publication immediately following the close of the excavation. As the first Director of the Institute of Archaeology (1973-1983), what did you see as its mission? Very simply, the founding resulted from the desire of faculty members to focus on a common intellectual goal. There was a conviction that an institutional home would energize an already existent rich pool of individual archaeologists. This intellectual dimension is what appealed to me personally: the challenge was to define a scope, in the belief that the organic structure would follow. Happily, it worked out. On April 27th, Professor Buccellati gave the 86th Faculty Research Lecture on "The Discovery of Ancient Urkesh and the Question of Meaning in Archaeology."
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