![]() ![]() What we can offer to do, then, is to take over at least part of the semiotic task the archaeologist has laid upon himself: but what this means, or could mean, will be more readily explained once we have defined the nature of semiotic research. What semiotics generally, and visual semiotics in particular, can bring to archaeology is, first, a comparative approach, permitting a classification of prehistoric visual displays, such as petroglyphs and pictograms, in relation to other visual signs, or other iconical signs, and other sign types generally, and, in the second place, an array of models, concepts, and methods, developed all through the fairly lengthy history of semiotics (which is longer, but less concentrated, than that of archaeology), mainly during the last century and a half, since the time of the proverbial founding-fathers, Peirce and Saussure, but in particular during the recent decades of intense semiotic research. Semioticians can not be expected to dig up the ground, or to turn over all the layers, not even in a metaphorical sense: it is not our task to develop full-blown archaeological theories, nor to explain all the details of concrete, situated, prehistoric displays. We are certainly not going to do the digging. 'Every archaeologist is, by the way, a semiotic researcher " (Nordbladh 1977:68) Semioticians are not offering (or menacing) to do the archaeologists' job. ![]() 'The data obtained, even if then classified by a computer, must be first comprehended and assimilated by the human mind to acquire significance and to ultimately enrich our culture' (Anati 1976: 163f). ![]()
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