Mapping identitiscapes: towards a semiotic archaeology of identity

Who we are—and who we choose to be—has never been a neutral or a natural occurrence. The construction of identity has long been a tool of power relationships, shaping history/ies, boundaries and human rights. In both past and present, political powers have used rigid identities to justify exclusion, erase multiplicity and impose bulky, exploitable narratives. Archaeology, when critically engaged as ‘a discipline of traces’ (Crossland Reference Crossland, Boyd and Doonan2021, 87) rather than simply as one of things, has the potential to expand our datasets and challenge monolithic frameworks, revealing instead the fluid, contested and relational nature of human existence.

This Special Issue, Archaeological Identitiscapes: A Semiotic Stance, brings identity and semiotics into dialogue, arguing that their collaboration can facilitate archaeologists’ mission to move beyond uniform, elite-driven, ableist, colonial and andro-centric histories, revealing the multiplicity and changeability of the past.

Identity defines who and what individuals and social groups choose to be, in relation to others, their pasts and the material conditions of their worlds of possibilities. In this conception, identity becomes an extended and dynamic project that aims to deepen our knowledge of humanity as a relational entity, eternally in the process of becoming. On the one hand, archaeology is the field devoted to recognizing, collecting and interpreting the material remains of this project’s multiple expressions. On the other hand, semiotics is an interdisciplinary subject concerned with the mechanisms of interpretation of signs and hence with the dynamic systems of meaning production. Rooted in the amplification of knowledge, both semiotic and identity-driven research share a profound dissatisfaction with permanent solutions, immutable answers and monolithic constructs. Similarly, archaeology aims to address static narratives of the past critically, instead embracing complexity by integrating multiple perspectives and foregrounding marginal voices. This shared commitment to uncovering dynamism explains why both identity and semiotics frequently intersect with archaeological investigations.

The papers in this collection, drawing primarily, but not exclusively, from Peirce’s theory of meaning, explore the role of multiple, at times minimal, signs—spanning official discourses to ceramic decorations, stress markers on bones to palynological remains—in shaping the evolving, and often contradictory, identities of past peoples, from Madagascar to New Mexico, from Britain to Sardinia. This Special Issue addresses varied audiences, including archaeologists focusing on theory, the classical world, prehistory and indigeneity; anthropologists interested in post-colonial, subaltern, gender and decolonial studies; semioticians, philosophers and sociologists questioning meaning and identity; as well as historians of the ancient and modern worlds.

Identity and power: beyond binaries, toward belonging

In 2007, Timothy Insoll (Reference Insoll2007, 1) famously wrote that ‘identity today is a “hot” topic even though it might not be defined as such’. Almost twenty years on, we can agree that identity is still explicitly ‘the theme that underlines many political phenomena’ (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama2018, 182), which are often at the opposite side of the spectrum, from the rise of nationalisms to the struggle against the exclusion of vulnerable groups. Ongoing political debates, often fed by populist agendas, growing nationalist movements and the denigration of marginalized groups such as refugees and migrants, tend to create ad hoc homogeneous identities that exclude those who do not fit in. They often lead to severe social and political consequences—like compromising access to basic civil rights. These developments demand urgent critical attention, as their theoretical foundations are flawed and reflect not only a distortion of identity, but also have a direct impact on the lives of many. Language reflects this urgency: in the last decade, several of the most used words of the year in major dictionaries are identity-related: allyship, complicit, xenophobia. The most recent, allyship, is particularly meaningful for the papers composing this Special Issue: the neologism defines ‘the state or condition of being a person who supports the rights of a minority or marginalized group without being a member of it’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Like identity, allyship implies not only recognizing otherness, but also accepting that someone from outside a group has an active role in advocating for its members’ struggles—a new term defining a long-living practice seen also in the history of applied anthropology.

The poignant relevance of identity today extends beyond contemporary politics to the study of the past. Identity has been co-opted in exclusionary narratives: the term is often mistrusted owing to its frequent weaponization by far-right propaganda and its intent to undermine liberal agendas worldwide. Yet it remains central to archaeological inquiry. For instance, most archaeological work aiming to highlight subaltern human groups inevitably deals with identity through prominent acculturation paradigms—Romanization (Millett Reference Millett1992; Versluys Reference Versluys2014), Christianization (Jessen Reference Jessen2012), Islamization (Walshaw Reference Walshaw2010), Hellenization (Vranić et al. Reference Vranić, Janković, Mihajlović and Babić2014). Although fundamental in highlighting common material culture aspects across time and space, acculturation paradigms have historically flattened multifaceted identities into rigid assertions of power, reinforcing the perspectives of dominant groups.

The implications of these narratives are clear: for decades, identity has been framed as a fixed essence to be preserved and defended from alleged external threats. Decades of critical theory have allowed people worldwide to disclose ‘the silliness of affirming the “purity” of an essential essence, and the utter falseness of ascribing to one tradition a kind of priority (…) over all others’ (Said Reference Said2013, xv). Nevertheless, this notion has been extensively used in political discourse to justify policies that increase social inequality and decrease cultural understanding in the name of historical bonds and cultural/religious ‘authenticity’. The papers in this Special Issue confront this perspective, foregrounding the fluidity of human identities and practices, their entanglement with material culture and their relational nature, emphasizing how identities are negotiated through agency, historical contingency, social interactions and power.

Identity could be described as an answer to the apparently simple question: ‘who are you/they?’ Some would answer with a single word, while others would need a more elaborate reply. In his Les Identités Meurtrières, Amin Maalouf warns us that, as many other concepts we use lightly in life, identity is a false friend: ‘we all think we know what the word means and go on trusting it, even when it’s slyly starting to say the opposite’ (Maalouf Reference Maalouf1998, 9). Maalouf reports his reaction when asked whether he felt more French or Lebanese. His answer casts doubt onto the legitimacy of the question itself, stating that those simple adjectives would not cover the complexity of a human being whose foundations involve elements as heterogeneous as the Arabic language, French water and wine, Dickens, Dumas, the Lebanese mountains, the French stones, and more.

Identity is indeed complex, and dynamic. Maya Angelou captures some of this fluidity when she reflects on people declaring their religious belonging, questioning whether identity is a fixed state or rather ‘a lifelong endeavour’ to pursue: ‘the idyllic condition cannot be arrived at and held on eternally. It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy’ (Angelou Reference Angelou1993, 73). Identities, like cultures, are constantly becoming: this process generates nuances and contradictions that do not fit ‘the state of unattractive and aggressive affirmativeness into which they are twisted by authoritarian figures who, like many pharisees or mullahs, pretend to speak for the whole culture’ (Said Reference Said2013, xv). Identity questions require patient answers and contextualization. The desire for recognition is legitimate but risks fuelling exclusionary, often xenophobic, politics. As exemplified in the study of modern Greece and Israel by Greenberg and Hamilakis (Reference Greenberg and Hamilakis2022), nationalist movements have long exploited this mechanism, rejecting elaborate responses and using selective historical narratives to craft rigid identities.

In Milan Kundera’s words, ‘Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self’ (Kundera Reference Kundera1997, 33). But individual memory alone might not suffice. For Francis Fukuyama (Reference Fukuyama2018, 10), ‘it is not enough that I have a sense of my own worth if other people do not publicly acknowledge it or, worse yet, if they denigrate me or don’t acknowledge my existence.’ Indeed, because memory requires ‘regular contact with the witnesses of the past’ (Kundera Reference Kundera1997, 33) due to humans’ need to be seen, ‘the modern sense of identity evolves quickly into identity politics, in which individuals demand public recognition of their worth’ (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama2018, 10). However, to prevent this need from being essentialized, and ‘slide over into a demand for the recognition of the group’s superiority’ (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama2018, 22), full theoretical awareness of how identity is reshaped through dialogue and negotiation is crucial.

Identity in archaeology: from essentialism to multiplicity

Just as identity is contested in contemporary politics, so too is it a point of contention in archaeology. As Mike Rowlands (Reference Rowlands and Bond1994, 133–4) argued, as nations cannot exist without pasts, they have consistently exploited archaeology as a reservoir of raw materials for constructing national identities. For this reason, archaeologists cannot stand apart from these dynamics. The promotion of monolithic identities to reinforce contemporary identity politics has often led to a banalization of the past. In turn, this simplified past often leaks dangerously unmediated into the present, contributing to the erasure from history of marginalized groups that do not align with dominant national, religious or ethnic groups.

The legacy of nineteenth-century nationalism, which equated cultural unity and national identities, ‘led archaeologists to pay increasing attention to the geographical distribution of distinctive artefacts and artefact assemblages in an effort to relate them to historical people’ (Trigger Reference Trigger1989, 215). This logic persists, as binary classifications continue to shape archaeological interpretations, producing ‘essentialist statements like “the Celtic spirit” [that] have the potential to be used in problematic ways that often seem to suggest or imply some kind of inner racial essence’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2010, 139). Such narratives echo into the present, reinforcing allegedly positive stereotypes—‘Asians are smart’, ‘Latinos are passionate, ‘Indigenous people are spiritual’, ‘Black folks can dance’—that ‘have a sinister underside’ (Benjamin Reference Benjamin2024, 12): the implication that groups are innately predisposed to a particular (often negative) character. This framework has been weaponized by extremist identity-politics using archaeology to legitimize oppressive ideologies that exclude certain groups from sharing equal rights and access to resources (see Hofman et al. Reference Hofmann, Hanscam and Furholt2021). More broadly, these attitudes—traditionalism, rejection of analytical criticism and diversity, machismo, obsession for the birthplace as foundational of social identity, repudiation of the individual, glorification of uniform groups—align with what semiologist Umberto Eco (Reference Eco1995) identifies as hallmarks of Ur-fascism. Given today’s charged political climate worldwide, archaeologists must be especially cautious in presenting simplistic interpretations that can be used in bad faith to deflect accountability and justify repressive actions in the name of supposedly shared history undergoing the guise of, for instance, ‘Western values’. In fact, many archaeologists today are fighting this faulty logic and working busily to shape a shared methodology that acknowledges identity’s dynamic nature. As Maia Kotrosits (Reference Kotrosits2020, 145) demonstrates in her deconstruction of white supremacists’ appropriation of classical antiquity as the origins of ‘Western Civilisation’, archaeology can and must engage with the past critically, resisting its misuse for narrow political agendas.

Archaeologists are aware that material culture does not simply reflect pre-existing identities—it actively contributes to their formation. As Casella and Fowler (Reference Casella and Fowler2005, 8) argue, every action is performed with reference to prior knowledge and experience, whether in continuity with or opposition to the past. Identity—whether personal or collective—always revolves around a process of negotiation, shaped by the decisive moment of confrontation, and choice. Whether oppressive, inherited, imposed, or freely adopted, identity is ‘a matter of decisions’ (Remotti Reference Remotti1996, 5). And decisions always entail responsibility. Shaping methods fit to recognize this complexity is key for a socially engaged archaeology.

The ‘perception of invisibility’ (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama2018, 88) and struggle for recognition remain central to discussions of inequality and social justice. Archaeological projects committed to amplifying marginalized voices—whether through decolonization (Lemos Reference Lemos2023), feminism from below (Battle-Baptiste Reference Battle-Baptiste2017; Morris & Bickle Reference Morris and Bickle2022), subalternity and indigeneity (Marín-Aguilera Reference Marín-Aguilera2021a,b), anti-racism (Flewellen et al. Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant and Odewale2021), feminist posthumanism (Fredengren Reference Fredengren2021), Actor-Network Theory (Harman Reference Harman2018; Van Oyen Reference Van Oyen2016), New Materialism (Harris Reference Harris2021; Kotrosits Reference Kotrosits2020; Mol Reference Mol2023)—share an interest in actively resisting static identity constructions.

These approaches illuminate all-encompassing aspects of past materialities, such as the structural precarity of the Roman world (Van Oyen Reference Van Oyen2023) or the multiple identities in Viking society (Kay & Eriksen Reference Kay, Eriksen, Matić, Gaydarska, Coltofean and Díaz-Guardamino2024), by mobilizing intersectional collaborations. Their shared aim is to overcome rigid classifications, crafting complex histories centred on agents that move beyond the White, Western, heterosexual, educated, able-bodied male typically upheld as ‘a universal and neutral human figure—an Everyman’ (Crellin Reference Crellin, Moen and Pedersen2025, 47). Semiotics, particularly Peirce’s ‘anti-essentialist’ framework (Crellin et al. Reference Crellin, Cipolla, Montgomery, Harris and Moore2021, 37), offer a powerful tool in advancing this effort.

Semiotics between presence and absence: a disciplinary itinerary

Semiotics is an international field of studies that cuts across numerous disciplines, as it deals with an entity that is of interest to any subject: signs. Semiotic logic occurs when an object becomes meaningful beyond its immediate material presence—or when, even in the ‘here-and-now’, it is perceived differently by different humans, animals and other organisms (Crossland & Bauer Reference Crossland and Bauer2017, 9). Semiotics’ first written framework arose in Plato’s reflections on semata, while its first institutional establishment as a philosophical branch dates to the second half of the nineteenth century, when American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, in his ‘Some consequences of four incapacities’ (Reference Peirce1868), stated that, in opposition to Cartesianism, humans ‘have no power of thinking without signs’ (Peirce Reference Peirce1868, 141). Following many classical approaches (from the stoics to Saint Augustin, from Locke to Jakobson), a general theory of semiotics, enshrined by scholars such as Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes from the 1960s, deals with the notion of sign as something that ‘stands for something else (aliquid stat pro aliquo)’ (Eco Reference Eco, Gałkowski and Roszak2018, 21)—entailing a broad set of relationships (logically justified), not to be confused with mere acts of hierarchical ‘representations’. Indeed, although the modality of the being for can vary (smoke can stand for—signify—fire, as much as a cloud can stand for rain, and the letters d-o-g for a human’s best friend), every sign ‘forces’ us to face a dialectic of presence and absence (Eco Reference Eco, Gałkowski and Roszak2018, 23).

Semiotics is a methodology that traces the chain of reasonings that relate specific objects, present to the interpreter, to other objects, which are often absent. The relations between present and absent objects are the semiosis, or production of sense/meaning, a process that can go on ad infinitum. But even the seemingly unlimited semiosis can come to an end, when it meets ‘real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; (…) [faced by which] any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion’ (CP V.384). Peirce’s structures test the strength of interpretations: the most solid of them, likely to last, tend to incorporate a chain of multiple sign types that ‘will act to constrain one another’ (see Preucel, this Issue).

The last aspect is crucial in today’s post-truth age, and it is especially relevant to debates concerning archaeology and identity. Archaeology is a deeply semiotic discipline (Sirigu Reference Sirigu2001) as it deals with its finds—present before the archaeologists—as material remains of past activities that archaeologists cannot witness directly. Aiming to transcend the artefacts per se (Garcia-Rovira Reference Garcia-Rovira2013), archaeologists seek to find out more about the contexts in which they were used, about the social groups or individuals using them, or even about the system of values to which humans are ‘subordinate and helpless’, as Hodder (Reference Hodder1985, 21) critically points out, referring to the passive role assigned by processualism to individuals in society. But archaeology is profoundly semiotic, not only because its system welcomes new physical evidence, inviting multiple interpretations to enrich an object’s ontology, but also because the chain of evidence thus formed imposes hard limits to what can possibly be said. Once an occurred event is supported by such evidential chain, no opinion can undo its happening. Valentina Pisanty’s (Reference Pisanty2019) essay on the comeback of right-wing xenophobes demonstrates this by analysing how discourses of Holocaust denial will never dismantle the chain of evidence—concentration camps, historical documents, objects, bodies, witnesses, genocidal discourse by the perpetrators—that document the industrialized extermination of Jews, Roma and Sinti. In fact, negationists never engage with the collected evidence, their only recourse lying in essentialist stereotypes and racial slander (Pisanty Reference Pisanty2019, 180–83). From this point of view, archaeology offers semiotics an exemplary model for theorizing the limits of interpretation: its rigorous method of evidence gathering constrains unfounded speculation, offering a corrective to the recurrent political misuse and abuse of the past.

By exposing deeply relational, dynamic, and meaningful past(s), this Special Issue stresses the idea that ‘in the end, we exist as “communities in conversation”, a semiotic collective’ (Preucel Reference Preucel2021, 465). Scholars pursuing different agendas will find the semiotic foundation of the papers in this collection inspiring and useful to the common mission to call out and avoid the essentialist, ranked and exclusive interpretations of the past in hierarchical makings of the present.

Semiotics in archaeology: meaningful materiality and identity construction beyond communication

Peircean semiotics has often attracted the attention of scholars of the human past—Uspenskii’s ‘Semiotics of history’ (Reference Uspenskii and Lotman1974), Gardin’s ‘Semiotics and archaeology’ (Reference Gardin, Sebeok and Sebeok1988), Preucel’s Archaeological Semiotics (Reference Preucel2006). Its ability to codify the dialogue between presence and absence makes semiotics indispensable to archaeology, far from having exhausted its contribution to the science of the human past (Tamm & Preucel Reference Tamm, Preucel, Pelkey, Petrilli and Ricciardone2022).

However, ‘archaeology started off on the wrong foot when it came to the questions of meaning’ (Crossland Reference Crossland, Boyd and Doonan2021, 85): its popularity has largely remained within the linguistic framework of Ferdinand de Saussure (Reference Saussure1989), for whom a sign is a binary structure establishing an arbitrary connection between the signifier (the word expressing the object, or sound pattern) and the signified (the mental concept that the signifier represents). This relationship, governed by the social conventions that define languages, produces meanings that are fixed until new conventions redefine them. Nonetheless, such a model is neither politically neutral nor unbiased. While symbolic communication is a human act that cuts across gender, class and race boundaries, the act of symbolizing in a durable and visible way depends on access to economic means and power— meant as ‘a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects’ (Foucault Reference Foucault1982, 789).

While Saussure’s model explains communication’s reliance on conventional symbols, it does not encompass all forms of signification. Symbols—conventional signs in Peirce’s terms—were often crafted as communicative acts by those with means to assert prestige, authority and ideology. Their durability—embedded in materials like marble, which enabled the creation of monuments such as triumphal arches—has granted them a lasting role in both securing consent and shaping history. In contrast, those without full access to resources left fewer enduring symbols, imprinted on more perishable materials. Still, their lives produced abundant signs: their bones, material culture and environment are scarred by labour and structural violence, but also by imagination, creativity and practices to resist and negotiate power relations. But archaeology’s tendency to see mark-making as symbolic ‘often blind[s] us to other, more basic dimensions of the cognitive life and agency of those marks as material signs’ (Malafouris Reference Malafouris2021, 1).

This is where Peirce’s triadic model becomes invaluable. It introduces a third element—the interpretant (a further component of the sign not to be confused with the interpreter)—between a sign and its object, allowing for a dynamic, contextual and historically situated understanding of signs (Preucel Reference Preucel2021). His classification of signs—symbols (arbitrary conventions), icons (resembling their objects) and indices (causally or physically linked to their referents)—enables archaeologists to interpret the unintended, non-arbitrary marks. This includes both the lives of the marginalized and the less visible aspects of those in power, as well as the lives of non-human animals whose lives produce an infinite series of iconic and indexical interpretations, from marking the territory to communicating feelings (Francescoli Reference Francescoli2021). As Swenson and Cipolla (Reference Swenson and Cipolla2020, 13) emphasize, Peirce’s semiotics transcends symbolic conventions, engaging with ‘the non-arbitrary properties of signs in relation to their objects’—a crucial step toward an inclusive archaeology.

The Saussurean and Peircean frameworks, though, are not mutually exclusive; rather, they serve different purposes. Saussure’s model shaped some of the Humanities’ most important frameworks—structuralism and poststructuralism—within which ‘the arbitrary nature of the sign was taken for granted’ (Hodder Reference Hodder2012, 16). But Peirce’s expanded framework is increasingly relevant to multi-vocal approaches that seek meaning beyond communications. As Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm’ shows, meaning often emerges from subtle, at times discarded, details. Drawing on Freud’s analysis of symptoms, Sherlock Holmes’s deductive method and Morelli’s attention to overlooked artistic details, Ginzburg highlights how the most revealing elements are often found where conscious effort is least pronounced. Much like the reading of animal tracks (Fabbri Reference Fabbri, Bertrand and Marrone2019), semiotics emphasises ‘the minute investigation of even trifling matters, to discover the traces of events that could not be directly experienced by the observer’ (Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg1989, 104). This evidential paradigm is precious for archaeology’s task to interpret both symbols and the imprints of directly lived experience (e.g. Preucel 2006; Reference Preucel2021), whether inscribed on bones, embedded in landscapes, or encoded in material culture. Archaeology, attuned to these traces, can reconstruct not just dominant narratives, but the complex interplay of human—and non-human—histories, revealing worlds otherwise unseen.

The papers in this Special Issue explore this balance across a range of periods, regions and material remains: from the shift in pottery colour in highland Madagascar indexing gendered political affects during rebellion (Crossland) to the revival of Pueblo pottery designs evoking past resistance to promote unity (Preucel); from the entanglement of pollens, bodies and funerary customs in ancient Sardinia (Puddu & van Dommelen) to inscribing monumental stones with new scripts across the Irish Sea as Roman power waned (Gardner). Each study explores how material culture gains significance, not through its mere presence, but through its embodiment in social practices. Through semiotics, archaeologists can recover silenced actors, affiliations and affects from the margins of history, revealing how even minimal material details actively participate in the production of social meaning.

Unlike language, material culture conveys both discursive and non-discursive meanings through practice (Hodder Reference Hodder1982; Miller Reference Miller2008). Peirce’s semiotic framework—comprising the representamen (sign), its object (material reality) and the interpretant (the response to the link between sign and object)—offers a flexible tool to engage with a wide range of past experiences. Interpretants, crucial to connect us to those experiences, allow us to acknowledge ‘how signs are interpreted through the body and through habits of action and belief’ (Crossland Reference Crossland, Boyd and Doonan2021, 98).

The divergence between de Saussure and Peirce extends beyond the binary versus triadic logic. Many structuralist and poststructuralist philosophers, such as Roland Barthes in his Mythologies, criticized the common understanding that the signifier directly and simply expresses the signified as part of a binary correspondence, arguing that meaning arises through their correlation (Barthes [1957] Reference Barthes2014, 216; Paolucci Reference Paolucci2010). Peirce made this explicit: meaning is not inherent to the sign–object relations but emerges through interpretation. The key difference lies in how these models conceptualize the meaning-making correlations: while both acknowledge that symbols operate through convention, only Peirce extends semiotics to include icons and indices—moving the interpretive process beyond the mind into bodies and material things. In other words, although all symbols are signs, not all signs are symbols. This distinction has profound implications for archaeologists: by assuming that all signs are conscious symbols, archaeology risks privileging monumental record and elite narratives over the diverse lived experiences and material efforts that shaped them. Failure to recognize this distinction risks allowing monolithic, binary identifications to emerge.

Critiques of binary identifications—especially in gender identity (Ghisleni et al. Reference Ghisleni, Jordan and Fioccoprile2016)—have been advanced by numerous archaeological works in recent years (Casella & Fowler Reference Casella and Fowler2005; Díaz-Andreu et al. Reference Díaz-Andreu, Lucy, Babić and Edwards2005; Gardner Reference Gardner2007; Gardner et al. Reference Gardner, Herring and Lomas2013; Pitts Reference Pitts2007). Similar concerns (Brück Reference Brück2021; Crellin Reference Crellin2021; Crellin & Harris Reference Crellin and Harris2020; Thomas Reference Thomas2022) have emerged regarding the problematic handling of ancient DNA data as a primary source for defining identity (see Allentoft et al. Reference Allentoft, Sikora and Sjögren2015). As underlined by Gardner (this Issue), as archaeology leans once more towards the scientific, generalizing end of the spectrum, with growing enthusiasm for aDNA and isotopic studies of ancestry, kinship, and migration, we risk ‘falling back into normative stereotypes of identity’, revitalising the binaries springing from racist bio-deterministic imagination (Battle-Baptiste Reference Battle-Baptiste2020). This issue stems from a reliance on binary models of signification that, shaped by symbolic logic, impose rigid categorizations onto data, assigning fixed gender, class, or ethnic labels to objects, landscapes and people. Binary (mis-)understandings of signs have been a key issue in archaeology since its culture-historical origin, tending to fuel bulky narratives that linger and shape modern identities. As Ruha Benjamin (Reference Benjamin2024, 12) observes analysing the paradox of the ‘Black Athlete’, ‘if you are genetically predisposed towards one thing, doesn’t that mean you could be inherently deficient in another?’ The result is an essentialized past—and a problematic present—that overlook the agency, historical singularity and creativity behind the dynamic process of meaning-making—pillars of the post-structuralist paradigm shift (Hodder Reference Hodder1993, 369). Like signs, identities are fluid and resist fixed hierarchies. The overlap between identity and semiotics becomes especially evident when their flow is disrupted—only then do meanings harden, giving rise to rigid, binary definitions of self and other.

Semiotics helps us resist this rigidity, providing a valuable framework for opening up the interpretive process, favouring the identification of diverse, yet coexisting, meanings of the past. Two studies framing seemingly ordinary green lawns through a semiotic lens illustrate this further. Elizabeth Kryder-Reid’s (Reference Kryder-Reid and Springs2015) study of California’s nineteenth- to twentieth-century ‘mission gardens’ highlights how superficially serene landscapes can erase complex histories. Today curated as peaceful heritage sites romanticizing California’s origins, these lush, green lawns bely their colonial past where arid, dusty landscapes were sustained only through coerced indigenous labour. The peaceful landscapes ‘mask their colonial legacy as sites of labor, violence, and oppression’ (Kryder-Reid Reference Kryder-Reid and Springs2015, 84), cancelling the life experienced by Native Americans. Yannis Hamilakis’s (Reference Hamilakis2025) study of an aerial photograph of Brown University’s Main Green (Associated Press, 30 April 2024) draws our attention towards the square, yellowed patches on the usually pristine lawn, traces of a dismantled student encampment protesting human rights violations in Gaza and Palestine. These cropmarks—invoking ‘both visually and materially, contemporary transient migrant shelter’ (Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2025, 6)—act as signifiers through which the encampment emerges as a multi-temporal space linking two histories of displacement: the Palestinian struggle and Brown University’s presence on unceded ancestral land of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, emblematic of broader settler-colonial dispossession of Native America. Reading these traces as complex icons, indices, and symbols undoes the sanitization of public spaces and cultural heritage, creating a multi-layered archaeology of the present that deepens our understanding of materiality as politically meaningful and historically grounded.

These examples show that sites and material culture, like apparently neutral green lawns, are contested terrains of ever shifting meanings. Semiotics, attuned to connectivity, opens space for a richer archaeology—one that resists binary reduction, highlights invisible connections and reclaims the complexity of human experience.

Living with the meanings of the past

The theoretical framework outlined above shows that semiotics, intermittently deployed in archaeology since the 1970s linguistic turn, is valuable in engaging with the multiplicity of the past, if this is understood beyond the metaphor of the site-as-text (Puddu Reference Puddu, Gałkowski and Roszak2018, 244–8). It offers a powerful tool to investigate explicitly the plurality and fluidity of social identities and, crucially, to address social inequalities, enabling the amplification of disenfranchised voices. Whereas archaeology can unearth the stratigraphic and diachronic nature of identities, semiotics can be used to bring the relational structures of identity and the communication of identity to the fore. In envisaging the archaeological record as a set of interconnected signs whose cognitive potential overcomes the material space they occupy, becoming meaningful to individuals and communities, semiotics holds the largely unexplored potential to enhance our understanding of the material complexity of the past, ultimately offering inspiration to contemporary identity-centred political debates.

A semiotically aware interpretation of the past needs to embrace the idea that ‘signs in human worlds are inherently contestable and subject to historical transformation’ (Keane Reference Keane2018, 83). As such, an archaeological history of the world is necessarily plural and transformative. As new data and discourses continually reshape the debate on the construction and renegotiation of identities, our understanding of the human past evolves. This ever-shifting interplay between absence and presence makes semiotics indispensable for engaging meaningfully with archaeology’s interpretive challenges.

Archaeology is now faced with the unique opportunity and the moral responsibility to contribute to today’s socio-political debates with its rigorous methodology. Specifically, the matter of how we might restore the relational essence of identity, salvaging it from those who might skew the term to abdicate any responsibility for their actions—‘we are forced to act this way because of our identities’—becomes particularly pressing.

This is the question which the contributions in this collection have struggled to answer: how do we make the multifaceted meanings of the fragmented materiality of the past stand out from contemporary monolithic identities?

The four papers expand and tease apart the discussion that took place during the interdisciplinary symposium How Do We Live With the Meanings of the Past?, held in Venice in May 2022 as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie project IDENTIS.Footnote ¹ This two-day event brought together archaeologists, semioticians, historians, illustrators, human rights activists, architects, music producers and scientists, all of whom contributed with generosity and critical insight. The discussion held there became the intellectual foundation of this collection, which analyses the remains of geographically and chronologically distant pasts, spanning nineteenth-century Madagascar to Classical period Sardinia, seventeenth-century New Mexico to Roman and post-Brexit Britain.

This introduction is followed by Robert Preucel’s examination of the semiotic dimension of social identity, which he regards as ‘one of the most complicated and often contentious kinds of signifying practices’. Introducing the concept of ‘semio-identity’ to highlight the relation between sign and identity in both communicative and embodied practice, he seeks to understand how seventeenth-century Pueblo Indian people—divided by language and rivalry—united to drive out the Spaniards during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. He describes how the emergent pan-Pueblo identity was materially expressed in site location, village architecture and pottery design. Preucel addresses recent calls from archaeologists and anthropologists to move beyond identity by underlining that it is through the study of past identities that archaeology has become ever more relevant to nowadays social issues, leading to crucial collaborations with other academic disciplines.

Zoë Crossland investigates how political meanings and past subjectivities can be detected, in non-discursive shapes, in the fragments of material culture, by paying metonymic attention to the crafting of objects. She explores what happens when the affective resonances of things are driven through political discourse, underlining that politics is articulated not only through mass events, but also through the minutiae of the daily relationships between people and with things. By looking at pottery production in highland Madagascar, Crossland examines how political shifts were expressed through material changes: for example, the sudden replacement of centuries-old, dark gun-metal grey colour on pottery— symbolically tied to the validation of weaponry and masculinity—with a sheer red during the nineteenth-century uprising against French colonialism and oppressive rule of the state functions as metonymy, red being the colour of the lamba shawls worn by the rebels. Crossland uncovers the material roots of symbolic authority: she shows how colour perceptions are embodied through experience, underlining women’s role in shaping power through crafts. By arguing that through metonymic attention we can access both political affectivity and usually elided or invisible actors of the past into view, she invites us all to ‘take the care, attention and time paid by past people to materials seriously as a site of enquiry’.

Mauro Puddu and Peter van Dommelen’s paper discusses the subaltern communities in rural Sardinia during the Carthaginian and Roman occupations of the island. They begin with a consideration of the multiple meanings of a fig: from being a symbol of imperialism in the hands of Roman Senator Cato, reappropriated and re-signified from below, this becomes one element of a chain of signs that challenge the coherence of dominant narratives. By offering a semiotic study of Antonio Gramsci’s historical category of subaltern groups, they deconstruct passive narratives of rural communities, portraying them as active agents, invested in shaping to their benefit a material world that to them was much more meaningful than the surplus they were asked to produce for imperial agendas.

The special issue concludes with Andrew Gardner’s study on the connections between identities and narratives of the past in the United Kingdom. Focusing on the Brexit debate, his study explores how both pro-Remain and pro-Leave political groups mobilized Britain’s past in fluid, and at times paradoxically similar, ways. Crucially, Gardner demonstrates that symbolic engagements with the past are not exclusive to contemporary politics: they also characterized Roman Britain’s communities’ practices. His contribution positions archaeology as a discipline capable of progressive political action, provided it is willing to deconstruct and critique misuses of the past and expose the inherent flexibility of human social processes. From inscribed stones in Roman-period Wales, tea drinking in the British Empire, to the symbolic repertories of 2016 British campaigns, Gardner calls on us to challenge reductive links between objects and identities, focusing instead on the ways in which the semiotics of practices, power, and inequality partake in the making of human subjectivities.

Each contribution reflects a shared commitment to exploring how, by adopting a semiotic stance, the fragmented and multifaceted materiality of the past can disrupt the simplified and monolithic identities so often promoted in the present. Accordingly, these papers do not treat the past as an inert entity, nor do they approach archaeology as a neutral study of material remains. Instead, they engage with it as a discipline that allows interrogating the traces of life, choice, power, inequality, creativity, attentiveness and political action. Through a semiotic lens, the authors of each paper foster the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue as a means to enhance our knowledge of the past, emphasizing its relevance to—and our responsibility towards—contemporary world issues, as emerged during the Venice symposium. Collectively, these contributions argue for archaeology’s capacity to shape inclusive counter-histories—un-silencing the muted voices of the past, while dismantling mechanisms of othering in the present, and interrupting the cycle of their perpetuation in the future.