“semitisches pantheon”. eine “männliche tyche” - MOSAIKjournal.com

DOMESTIC SPACE AND COMMUNITY IDENTITY |71
as an ethnographic phenomenon and not an archaeological one. 4
Others recognise households as centres of production, distribution,
transmission and reproduction, but draw on the ethnographic category
and declare that the embedding of household archaeology in a
comparative ethnographic matrix is vital to any approach which
will allow archaeologists to draw inferences about past household
behaviour. 5 In a nutshell, ethnographic data has a great potential
for household archaeology as it can be used to highlight diversity
and change in domestic worlds.
Another prominent example of cross-fertilisation is the employment
of semiotics in archaeology. Semiotics has much been
involved in the hermeneutics of material culture, and has also greatly
influenced research in household archaeology. The relevance of
semiotics here, lies in its theories that directly relate human behavioural
responses to the built environment. The aim of semioticians
over the past eighty years has been to „study sign systems instituted
by society within given contexts, in order to understand the culturally
codified conventions on which the process of signification is
based”. 6 These “culturally codified conventions” are one of the
determinants of domestic spatial form, perhaps the most complex
of all. A basic premise of the semiotic approach to architectural
analysis is that architecture, like language or any other cultural
product, is comprised of a system of signs for the communication
of information. The meaning of this information is transferred by
means of a culturally specific set of conventions or codes. Therefore,
buildings can be correctly “read” or understood only if the
coded meanings can be accurately interpreted by users. A good
example of the adaptation of this theoretical framework to the architecture
of the Early Minoan community of Myrtos in East Crete
was provided by D. Sanders. Sanders‟ model incorporated semiotic,
proxemic and behaviour-environment the author analyses of Early
Minoan architecture and by doing so analysed the relationship between
the built environment and the use of space from a perspective
focusing on ecological rather than cultural factors. 7
4 ALLISON (1999) 2–3.
5 WILK – RATHJE (1982) 613.
6 NECIPOĠLU (1981) 260.
7 SANDERS (1990) 43–72.