Symbolic and Structural Archaeology pdf

Ian Hodder est professeur d'archéologie de la famille Dunleavie à l'Université de Stanford. Membre de la British Academy, il a reçu de nombreux prix pour ses réalisations, dont la médaille Oscar Montelius de la Société suédoise des antiquaires, la médaille commémorative Huxley du Royal Anthropological Institute, le prix international Fyssen et la médaille d'or de l'Archaeological Institute of America, ainsi que des doctorats honorifiques des universités de Bristol et de Leiden. Hodder est l'auteur de nombreux livres, dont Symbols in Action (Cambridge, 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge, 1982) et Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (2012).

Symbolic and Structural Archaeology pdf par Ian Hodder

This volume presents a searching critique of the more traditional archaeological methodologies and interpretation strategies and lays down a firm philosophical and theoretical basis for symbolist and structuralist studies in archaeology. A variety of procedures, ranging from ethnoarchaeological studies and computing techniques to formal studies of artefact design variability, are utilized to provide models for archaeologists within the proposed framework and the theory and models are then applied to a range of archaeological analyses. This particular approach sees all human actions as being meaningfully constituted within a social and cultural framework. Material culture is not simply an adaptive tool, but is structured according to sets of underlying principles which give meaning to, and derive meanings from, the social world. Thus structural regularities are shown to link seemingly disparate aspects of material culture, from funerary monuments to artefact design, from the use of space in settlements, to the form of economic practices.