Representation and materiality in archaeology: A semiotic reconciliation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this introduction to the special edition, we argue that the theories of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce have the potential to bridge some of the deepest divides in archaeology. We also demonstrate that the adoption of an extreme ‘anti-representational’ position in thing-centred turns in the discipline is misguided, as scholars recognize diverse modalities of representation beyond symbols and immaterial signifiers. By combining the insights of Peircean semiotics, assemblage theory, and new approaches inspired by the ontological turn, we rehabilitate representation as a fundamental material process in the exercise of agency and the making and transformation of ‘meaningfully constituted worlds.’ Mobilizing theories on semiotic ideologies in particular, we further contend that the material worlds assembled through representational processes can often be harmful, unjust, contradictory, challenged and potentially reconfigured. Ultimately, as a semiotic science in its own right, archaeology must devise new ways to analyse the mediated representations of the past subjects they study. The diverse articles of this issue have made an important contribution exploring this central problem in archaeological research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it