text

In post-modernist thinking the idea of text implies far more than the written word: a text is an extended discourse produced in accordance with rules and procedures that make it not simply the work of its author but rather something that is interdependent with the mass of texts and statements which precede, accompany, and succeed it up to the point where it is being read by someone: what Kristeva has called ‘intertextuality’. Seeing a text in this way denies any notion of univocity and instead regards it as an open work susceptible to multiple readings that are intimately linked to cultural and political positioning—multivocity. In archaeology this way of thinking about text has implications not only for the study of excavation reports and published works in general, but also for situations where material culture has been interpreted through textual analogy—the proposition that material culture is structured and operates like text.