ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the state of social archaeology today, especially in relation to author usual topic of the Palaeolithic of Europe, combining two strands of Lewis-Williams' influence: the explicit engagement with theory and an explicit concern for 'the social'. Gosden has a much more ambitious project than to account for or understand the emergence and contexts of Palaeolithic art, but his theme, Social Being and Time, has some general and some specific relevance to people concerns. Semiotics, or the science of signs, has been implicated in interpretations of Palaeolithic art ever since the so called structuralist breakout of the 1960s, when Leroi-Gourhan implicitly drew upon the assumptions of structuralist thought. To review some recent shifts in scholarship associated with the interpretation of the European Palaeolithic imagery. To take up a consideration of the interpretations and the ontological, epistemological and historical aspects of the phenomenon of Palaeolithic art would be an enormous task.
