STRUCTURAL AND SEMIOTIC INVESTIGATIONS IN ARCHAEOLOGY - Volume 3
The third volume of "Structural and semiotics investigations in archaeology" shows us the appreciable expansion of the contributors' geography. The more papers of generalizing and theoretical nature have appeared, the material referred to the all epochs within the limits of which archeologists work is collected. It was not our intension to make such an all-purpose project. By and large, it is hardly need to be surprised by this since it is only the semiotics approach to learning of the ancient cultural heritage that is obviously capable to make such association real when, for example, a paper on the Paleolithic rock art would be read with interest by the medieval archeologist and it would not be read as a certain popular fiction but as the obligatory text for himself.
During preparing the collected papers it has been decided to translate the papers received in English into Russian. This task has appeared to be much more laborious than we could ever expect. It can be explained, first of all, by the fact that the editors are lack of the obligatory long-term professional experience in translating of so difficult text that the archaeological is and also by the problem of coordination of different mentality and approaches between the western scholars, on the one hand, and the explorers of the former USSR territory, on the other hand. As a consequent, we must inform our colleagues that we cannot guarantee the adequate reproduction of all the nuances of author's texts in the translations. Besides, we have to say that it would be better to translate texts not from English but from the language which is an author's mother tongue to be sure that the originality of author's ideas is reproduced as good as possible. In our case only three authors live in the English-speaking country. So we could obviously not avoid a triple loss of semantic nuances in author's texts while translating. Despite of this we believe that the vast information contained in the volume being checked by time has all chances to be compared with other systems of historic-humanitarian knowledge: sociohistorical, ethnologic-anthropological, cultural-mythological, etc.
A.V.Yevglevsky
