Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (307 page)

A square-section pillar, tapering out from ground level, typically about 2m high, and surmounted by the sculptured head of a deity. They are found widely in the Greek world, for example in the agora, and were also popular in the gardens of private houses in Roman times.

 
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Gothic chieftain in southern Russia whose kingdom was swamped by the movement of Huns and Alans westwards in the 370s
ad
. Hermanaric's defeat and suicide in ad 376 began the migration of Visigoths into the empire, and his memory was revered as the last of the old rulers of the Goths.

 
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The art, skill, theory, and philosophy of interpretation and understanding, especially in relation to reading texts. Originally developed in the 19th century by the German historian W. Dilthey and others, it revolved around perceived distinctions between natural and social phenomena, and hence the natural and social sciences with their approaches to the creation of knowledge: explanation (
erklaren
) and understanding (
verstehen
), respectively. Further development by Martin Heidegger introduced the concept of pre-understanding to the way people situate themselves in the world. This was taken up by H. Gadamer to constitute the basis of a
hermeneutic circle
. This tried to encapsulate the act of understanding or interpretation by recognizing that the relationship between a person and the perceived world in which they exist is always historically located and set within a tradition that is credited with authority. More recently still, Anthony Giddens has suggested a double hermeneutic circle in the sense that the responses that an individual gets from their engagement with the world within the framework of underlying pre-knowledge itself loops back to modify that pre-knowledge for future engagements. In archaeology this has three main areas of application. The first is in terms of exploring ancient material culture, explicitly recognizing the pre-knowledge that has gone into its development and deployment. The second is in relation to the archaeological process and the way that research unfolds in a kind of spiral action in which the knowledge created by one phase of enquiry becomes the pre-knowledge for the next. The third is in relation to the way that here in the present archaeologists give means to material culture that was produced in the past.

 
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Egyptian god. See
THOTH
.

 
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A settlement housing a religious individual or group seeking solitude and isolation. It generally includes a small chapel or oratory, one or more cells, and a domestic range. Larger examples are arranged around a courtyard or cloister. A hermitage is a kind of monastery, although its inmates led a more isolated and austere life. Some hermitages would serve just a single hermit, while other were occupied by a community of hermits—what Charles Thomas has called an ‘eremitic monastery’.

 
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South American farming cultures found in lowland Bolivia and tentatively dated to
c.
ad 500–1000. Characterized by their ceramic assemblages which belong to the Polychrome Horizon Style with broad and narrow painted bands that may have affinities with ceramics in the Amazon basin.

 
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