ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the importance of the archaeological imagination of the necessity to decode and translate, not least in source criticism and commentary, and also that there is no sense without the everyday mundane background of human life, against which meaningful work and historical events happen. The author more vignettes from the Borders in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have introduced a host of connected concerns in the modern archaeological imagination: artifacts and accounts, the different kinds of connection in past, senses of history and change, locality and belonging, and the ruin of time and change. The non-absent is ghost-like, a sign left by somebody or something that was once present, but has passed and is gone, lost: a phantasm. Wallace's and Lowenthal's thematics are very useful, and offer frames for their wonderful observations, glosses and insights. A semiotic square is a visual representation of the logical articulation of any category.
