Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (696 page)

Middle Neolithic communities of central Europe, especially southern Poland, the Czech Republic, and parts of southern and central Germany, characterized by the use of pottery decorated with geometric designs executed in short incised lines. This style of pottery appears to have developed from the local
LBK
ceramics during the 5th and early 4th millennia
bc
. Some of the most common motifs used are zig-zags.

 
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Strong , Donald Emrys
(1927–73)
[Bi].

British archaeologist whose main interests lay in the art and architecture of the Roman world. Born and brought up in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, he gained an open scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1948, reading Greats and taking a diploma in Classical Archaeology. He studied at the British School in Rome from 1952 and was awarded his D.Phil. in 1954. After a brief spell with the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments of the Ministry of Works he joined the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum in 1956. Here he published many papers and articles. In 1968 he was appointed to the Chair of the Archaeology of the Roman Provinces in the London Institute of Archaeology, a post he held until his death. He was president of the British Archaeological Association in 1972–3 and was a key figure in the founding of the Society for Libyan Studies and the Archaeology Abroad Service.
[Obit.:
Antiquaries Journal
, 54 (1974), 410–11]

 
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Strong , William Duncan
(1899–1962)
[Bi].

American archaeologist best known for developing the
DIRECT HISTORICAL APPROACH
during the interwar years. This involved working backwards in time from the recorded historical past into prehistoric times to develop local sequences of continuity and discontinuity.
[Bio.: G. R. Willey , 1998, William Duncan Strong . In
Portraits in American archaeology
. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 74–96]

 
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Theoretical approach to the analysis of archaeological material based on
STRUCTURALISM
, stressing the idea that human actions are guided by beliefs and symbolic concepts that are themselves underpinned by ways of thinking about the world. The basis of such studies is therefore to uncover the structures of thought and to see how these influenced the codes and rules that find expression in material culture. Structural codes denote particular meanings to members of a society—meanings that can change according to the context and associations of their visibility.

 
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The theoretical position that social parts are integrated and function to maintain the structural whole.

 
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A theoretical approach, derived originally from the study of language, concerned with the identification of structures in social or cultural systems. A philosophy holding that there are non-apparent, innate psycho-biological structures common to all human beings. Structuralism is a very influential approach and a body of cultural theory derived ultimately from work in linguistics. A major distinction is between language as it is spoken (
parole
) and language as the underlying system of signs (
langue
). Structuralism focuses on the latter, and makes a further distinction within the sign, between the signifier (for example, a word) and the signified (that which the sign refers to). The emphasis is on the system of signs, and their differences, rather than on the individual signs themselves. In anthropology, the approach was adopted by Lévi-Strauss , who analysed, among other things, native myths. He made heavy use of binary oppositions such as culture:nature, hot:cold, and raw:cooked to explain the way people saw the world. It is through this kind of analysis that structuralism is perhaps most widely known in archaeology, while a more pervasive influence has been through the linguistic or textual analogy, that cultural phenomena are structured as in a language. The major problem with structuralism is its privileging of structure over agency. There is the crucial, but often unanswered, question of the genesis and maintenance of structure, a question which
STRUCTURATION
and humanistic approaches attempt to address.