Symbolic and Structural Archaeology pdf

Ian Hodder è professore di archeologia della famiglia Dunleavie presso la Stanford University. Fellow della British Academy, ha ricevuto numerosi riconoscimenti per i suoi successi, tra cui la Medaglia Oscar Montelius dalla Società Svedese degli Antiquari, la Medaglia commemorativa Huxley dal Royal Anthropological Institute, il Premio Internazionale Fyssen e la Medaglia d'Oro dall'Archaeological Institute of America, insieme a dottorati honoris causa dalle università di Bristol e Leiden. Hodder è autore di numerosi libri, tra cui Symbols in Action (Cambridge, 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge, 1982) e Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (2012).

Symbolic and Structural Archaeology pdf da 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.