ABSTRACT
If one wishes to talk about paradigms in archaeology, where the term ‘paradigm shift’ means a fundamental change in the way in which archaeologists actually see the world of material culture, the decisive break occurs not in 1962 with the substitution of one form of empiricism for another (Binford 1962), but in 1982 with the appearance of Symbolic and structural archaeology (Hodder 1982a). This break involves, primarily, the conception of material culture as a signifying system in which the external physical attributes of artefacts and their relationships are not regarded as exhausting their meaning. This chapter briefly looks back at some of the assumptions involved in the ‘structuralist’ encounter in archaeology, then charts a course leading from structuralism to the post-structuralism of Derrida, Barthes and Foucault. 1 The change now occurring in archaeology is a move away from attempts to establish what basically amounted to the search for a methodology for assigning meaning to artefact patterning to a more fully self-reflexive position involving consideration of what is involved in the act of writing the past.
