Robert W. Preucel

This interdisciplinary book examines archaeology’s engagement with semiotics, from its early structuralist beginnings to its more recent Peircian encounters. It represents the first sustained engagement with Peircian semiotics in archaeology, as well as the first discussion of how pragmatic anthropology articulates with anthropological archaeology. Its central thesis is that archaeology is a distinctive kind of semiotic enterprise; one devoted to giving meaning to the past in the present through the study of materiality. It compliments standard studies of linguistics and reformulates contemporary theories of material culture. Providing an introduction to Saussure and a review of his legacy across structural, symbolic, and cognitive anthropology, Preucel goes on to present the Peircian alternative and highlights its influence on pragmatic anthropology. Of special interest are the discussions of the interrelations of structuralism and processual archaeology, poststructuralism and postprocessual archaeologies, and cognitive science and cognitive archaeology. The author offers two original case studies demonstrating how material culture pragmatically mediates social relations- one focusing on the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt from 1680-1694 and the other on the New England utopian community of Brook Farm from 1842-1846. Throughout his analysis, Preucel emphasizes the close links between archaeology and other social sciences. But he also contends that archaeology, by virtue of the powerful ideological character of the past, can open up new spaces for discourse and dialogue about meaning, and, in the process, make a valuable contribution to contemporary semiotics.

The dynamic discourse stimulated by 78 magnificent objects created by Native Americans over the years, now housed in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the responses of contemporary Native Americans to those objects forms the core of this book. As seen in these vibrant pages, the Museum is not a place of dead objects from the past. It is, rather, a place of people and ideas about human societies and cultures, a place of living, active objects, a place where the present can connect to the past. The volume editors frame important issues and concepts-the nature of Native American identity in the past and present, indigenous sovereignty, the active destruction of Native American cultures and languages over the past half-millennium, along with their perseverance and strength to survive, and, finally, the power of ancestors. As Richard M. Leventhal, the Museum's Williams Director, notes in his Foreword, the Native American scholars and artists who contribute to this book are assisting the Museum in its attempt to become a more integral part of today's world. It is the preservation of ideas embodied within objects from the past and present that allows for the representation and strength of Native American identity.