The theory of the lacuna and the principle of certainty of existence

The void left by an object in the stratification has been recognised as informative for centuries. Steno reads it as the symptom of an event; Jens Morten Hansen, rereading Steno's method, shows that lacunose systems allow statements of greater certainty than intact ones, and that the mind perceives that something is missing even when it does not know what; Edward Harris gives archaeology a unit for absence, the interface, which records the act of removal and not the object removed. This paper proposes to add a principle of the lacuna to the principles of stratigraphy. It does so through two moves: the inversion of the direction of inference, by which what the void certifies re-enters the record as an entity, and the shift of certainty from the object to the property. The result is the principle of certainty of existence: the lacuna certifies the existence of what is missing, and nothing else of its properties. It is accompanied by a principle of inheritance, by which the surviving part of a body passes on to the missing part the properties that belong to both. The principle is turned into a four-part rule, with a limit case that marks its boundaries, and tested on the Great Temple of Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa. Finally, the same logic is extended to the properties that can be missing even when the matter is intact, which I propose to call lacunae of qualia.