This is not an article about material culture as text

Archaeological attempts to see material culture as meaningfully consituted have often used an analogy with language as a structured system of signs separate from practical and expedient activity. This separation of meaning from the context of action has generated the split between normative and processual archaeology. Rather than being compared with language, material culture can be considered as a text. A text is a specific and concrete product, written to have effects in the world. It makes use of linguistic codes, aspects of which may universal, but a text can only be adequately interpreted in relation to the historical meanings which it manipulates and in relation to the nonarbitrary social and practical context in which it is "written". Material culture is recognized as a particularly material form of text, and some examples are given of the archaeological implications of the view that meaning and practice are closely tied in material culture.