Cuneiform archive formation and taphonomy

An archive that survives whole is actually a sign that something went wrong -- an institution died suddenly enough that nobody got around to recycling its paperwork. Clay tablets were valuable raw material: clerks routinely recycled paid-off receipts by soaking and remoulding the clay for reuse, and households weeded their own records on schedules nobody wrote down but that clearly existed. What survives today is, in effect, a double filter -- whatever was still on the recycling queue at the moment an institution stopped functioning, then whatever excavation and publication happened to preserve afterward -- and the conjectures gathered here try to model both filters at once, using nothing more than what was actually dug up and catalogued.

The recycling shadow treats routine tablet recycling itself as leaving a detectable statistical shadow on what remains. Two species of archive asks whether excavated archives actually sort into two structurally distinct species, long-lived institutional records versus short-lived household ones, rather than one continuous population. The first retention schedule reads the earliest evidence of deliberate document destruction as, in effect, the first recorded records-retention schedule.