Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (722 page)

 
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Small cube of coloured stone, tile, or glass, which, set in mortar, form components of a mosaic decoration.

 
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An excavation unit used to sample or probe a site before large-scale excavation or to check surface surveys. Typically small square trenches or holes arranged in such a way as to sample a site. See
SHOVEL PIT TESTING
.

 
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A Latin word for a device used to maintain the temperature of a Roman bath. It consists of a water container of half-cylindrical section with one end opening into the bath; the flat base of the
testudo
was placed above a furnace flue forming its roof.

 
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A four-arched crossing in a church or basilica.

 
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A north European tribe which attacked the Roman republic in 110 bc. The name has subsequently come to refer to members of a Teutonic nation, especially Germans.

 
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In post-modernist thinking the idea of text implies far more than the written word: a text is an extended discourse produced in accordance with rules and procedures that make it not simply the work of its author but rather something that is interdependent with the mass of texts and statements which precede, accompany, and succeed it up to the point where it is being read by someone: what Kristeva has called ‘intertextuality’. Seeing a text in this way denies any notion of univocity and instead regards it as an open work susceptible to multiple readings that are intimately linked to cultural and political positioning—multivocity. In archaeology this way of thinking about text has implications not only for the study of excavation reports and published works in general, but also for situations where material culture has been interpreted through textual analogy—the proposition that material culture is structured and operates like text.