The Meanings of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression

Abstract

review. The present volume is more in the way of a reviewer's nightmare, and the responsibility lies with Hodder for deliberately eschewing the conventional role of editor, his aim being to alert the reader to the power of text and, perhaps more important, to the power of editors in controlling the presentation of text. Hodder's device for achieving this end is simple enough; he took the logical structure of the text-Chapters 1 through 25, with introduction preceding sections organized around coherent themes-and scrambled it so that the chapters appear in random order (e.g., 18, 25, 13, 6, etc.; Hodder's introduction ends up embedded in the text, beginning on page 64). Series editor Peter Ucko points out in his preface to the volume that Hodder runs the risk of being accused of editorial neglect [p. xv], but rightly concludes that this is not the case. Hodder's introduction, Post-modernism, Post-structuralism and Post-processual Archaeology, is a thoughtful and provocative review of recent developments in the field and a responsible discussion of the contents of the volume