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Introduction

In the context of professional archaeological discussion, the term "material culture" has enjoyed constantly growing importance. And yet, its constant use at science conferences and in relevant publications is not at the moment matched by any clear analytical concept. Rather, the term "material culture" in most cases only describes the source basis of most research in Pre and Protohistory: those remains which are available as primary basis for the study of historical epochs before the use of a more widespread written tradition. For that reason, especially German research in the past mainly focused on reflecting on the many filtres which reduce the material inventory of culture over time.

Where, on the other hand, "material culture" has early on been recognized as an analytical concept, as, for instance, in New Archaeology, the presupposition of a direct, mechanical relationship between past processes and the present material representation was for a long time dominant. This led to a view of archaeological sources as "petrified behaviour". In accordance with this, it was supposed that the entirety of archaeological records represented the structure of past societies in detail and that therefore a reconstruction of their structure was easily possible through archaeology as well.

Such a concept has been rendered untenable especially by the more recent contribution of cultural theory of Postprocessual Archaeology. For that reason, the past 20 years have seen an increasing search for a conceptual framework for the interpretation of material culture which does more justice to the complexity of these connections. One approach is provided by a generally semiotic approach which regards material culture as an important and active part of any society (I. Hodder). In such a context, material culture appears as a medium providing a coded form of past ideas and meanings. A significant part of an archaeologists job will therefore be the decoding of the code at the basis of these objects.

A central problem with such an approach, however, lies in the fact that most material remains unearthed by archaeologists have not - at least not primarily - been produced with a communicative purpose in mind. Rather, they only indirectly hint at certain historical conditions and processes. Signs of usage and the context of findings of tools, for instance, provide clues as to specific primary and secondary use of these artefacts, or technical details and details of craft provide an indication for differentiation of certain "workshops" or "workshop circles". In such cases, we are not dealing with a direct statement imbued with meaning by the relevant community, but rather with unintentional traces of past activities, which can be better interpreted within a framework of an "indicative paradigm" (C. Ginzburg) rather than a by taking semiotic approach.

On the other hand, within the entirety of archaeological source material there are also, especially in craft and art productions, objects whose producers or users can hardly be denied a communicative intention in the broadest sense, even though addressee and contents of the relevant "material messages" are in specific cases hard to determine. Among these are the comparatively rare picture sources which we know of, especially in the areas of stone sculpture, toreutic and petroglyph art, as well as especially those objects which are generally given terms sich as "status symbols" or "prestige goods". Finds termed "ritual" objects are to be mentioned in this context as well. A potential for semiotic analyses analogous to those finds is given by the monumental grave or ceremonial architecture of the Neolithic and Preroman metal ages. The same goes for archaeologically well accessable depositions (especially graves and hoards), which can not only be questioned in terms of certain depositing purposes, but can often apparently be interpreted as to their meaning - for instance in terms of aspects of social organization or as expression of a certain cultural knowledge.

Far from intending to integrate every type of source as a sort of "text" into some "translation method" which does not give sufficient consideration to the different potentials of the analysis of written and material tradition, semiotic expansion of the concept of "material culture" undoubtedly offers interesting approaches to a conceptual expansion of the approaches to archaeological research. Starting out from a conceptual framework, the planned conference will transepochally discuss questions of interpretation of material culture and thus elaborate on the theoretical and methodological presuppositions at the basis of our interpretation. In order to achieve this, innovative contributions to archaeological studies of the dimension of meaning of material culture are to be presented and discussed. Apart from theoretical contributions aiming for clarification of the problems of cognitive and cultural theory discussed above, we are especially looking for specific case studies which offer concrete access to the interpretation of function and meaning of archaeological object groups or depositing practises by referring to critically studied analogous material.

The main focus of the conference will definitely be on the perspective of pre- and protohistoric Archaeology, including Mediaeval Archaeology, which deals with smilar questions. At the same time we are aware that the interpretation of material remains is not a problem exclusive to our field of study, but rather that the question of relevance of studies in material culture, which is of central importance to pre- and protohistoric studies in particular, can only be meaningfully rackled by an interdisciplinary approach. As such, we regard our own field of study as part of the more expansive, empirically orientated cultural anthropology. To this end, we regard as appropriate the inclusion of the perspectives of related cultural sciences also dealing with the interpretation of material culture (classical archaeology, ancient oriental studies, ethnology, anthropology, historic sciences, etc.) within the framework of the planned conference wherever feasilbly possible. For this reason, we want to specifically ask representatives of these disciplines for additional contributions as well as perhaps critical comments on existing archaeological approaches.

PD. Dr. Veit

translated by Fabian Kuhbach

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