Hekmatollah Mollasalehi; Sima Yadollahi
Volume 1, Issue 1 , January 2009, , Pages 185-198
Abstract
Dichotomy is a serious obstacle in archaeological studies; it is a problem all fields of human, social and historical knowledge and even natural sciences are faced with. However, in ...
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Dichotomy is a serious obstacle in archaeological studies; it is a problem all fields of human, social and historical knowledge and even natural sciences are faced with. However, in archaeology, especially prehistoric archaeology, this problem is followed with practical difficulties and epistemological failures as well. What is referred to as archaeological evidences are all wordless, distorted, and shattered into pieces which must be archaeologically organized, joined, structured, repaired, described, written, interpreted, analyzed, represented, reconstructed or conceptually, mentally and virtually reconstructed so that we can extract some kind of archaeological meaning and significance out of its material body despite its limitations and imperfections; an understanding that is not quite unrelated with the past events. By raising the key issue of style and symbol, the present paper attempts to study the possibility or impossibility of obtaining this goal in archaeological researches. The archaeological relics, when interpreted and analyzed semantically within a systematic methodology suitable to the subjects under study, can help build a bridge over to the conceptual systems, mental performances and forgotten desolate behaviours of ancient societies and populations. For this reason, the present paper has chosen the style and symbol like a bridge between the archaeological visible evidences and data and the past frozen conceptions and behaviours as its main topic.
