ABSTRACT
Representationalist accounts of meaning in the structuralist tradition exist in a free-floating and abstracted semiotic universe that is detached from time and place. The limits of an account in which meaning is constituted in relation to other meanings but not in relation to things, place or time are evident. Yet despite the many critiques that have been offered around this theme, the temporal dimensions of meaning remain relatively untheorized. This suggests that our theories of meaning remain largely atemporal in orientation, and also points to some of the limitations of the materially oriented critiques of recent years. In this chapter I explore what a fully temporal account of semeiosis (after C. S. Peirce) offers for archaeology. Drawing upon the histories of standing stones in highland Madagascar, the chapter situates the signs of the dead in time and place and draws out the implications for the semiotic and processual constitution of history.
