Archaeology and the meanings of material culture

Abstract

Whether considered as a more anthropological or more historical discipline, archaeology is a science of objects, which one nowadays more commonly calls 'material culture'. No matter how we define culture, though, it involves communication and meaning and the archaeologist's task may be defined as that of extracting, or rather of proposing meanings to objects produced by human cultures. That task is surrounded by great difficulties, quite different from those presented by written texts or oral tradition. It is now almost common sense that objects communicate, or are rather means for communication, either between contemporaries (their producers and users) or through time, as monuments from the past that we try to transform into documents. Since the 60's Semiotics and Anthropology have been trying to decipher the world of things by imagining it is structured like a language, with its own grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. In archaeology, the most daring experiment in this sense was perhaps that of David Clarke (1968, 1972), but it had no followers and the parallel between language and material things seems in fact to lead to a dead end. More recently, the emphasis in archaeological theory has shifted from language, understood as a signic system, to symbolic systems, with all the complexities associated with the interpretation of symbolic meanings. Considering material culture as a symbolic system opens an extraordinarily fertile field of investigation, but poses new problems and difficulties. It the last of these I wish to explore further here. © 2005 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York.