ABSTRACT
The marriage between structural analysis and formal archaeology has not been altogether a happy one, despite their common intellectual aims. The existence of material culture ‘symbols’ is often proclaimed in current archaeological research, and ‘codes’ are invoked to account for their integral organization and for the generation of ‘meaning’, yet the liberal adoption of structural and semiotic terminology in questions involving the meaning of material culture is rarely matched by operational procedures that would allow the rigorous examination of propositions and theories against empirical data. This frequent lack of formalization creates the suspicion that structural or semiotic explanations often amount to little more than post-hoc accommodative arguments (Renfrew 1982, p. 13), or, still worse, mere exercises in free association.
