The scientific discipline of archeology has gone through various stages of its development and improvement of research methods. First, it was combined with ancient history and the history of art. In the mid-nineteenth century, the base of its chronology was on biblical events. Modernist archeology of the twentieth century focused on classifying monuments and reconstructing cultural processes. In the second half of the twentieth century, archeology inspired other disciplines of culture and science to “stratigraphically” look at their own history. In this way, the stratification of scientific thought (archeology of knowledge), the history of photography (archeology of photography), and the media (archeology of media) began to be analyzed. Archeology has become a cognitive metaphor in contemporary culture. Lack of knowledge of the theoretical and methodological achievements worked out by archaeologists may, after some time, lead to the trivialization and petrification of the archaeological metaphor, although today it still seems fresh and innovative for “archeology of media,” “archeology of photography,” or “archeology of modernism.”
The ways of interpreting prehistoric burial grounds were modified several times within last decades. However, still dominant is the approach in which the most important is to document well, to systemize and to specify grave findings. The present paper considers the researches emphasizing the space relations in the burial ground area as well as the interrelations between ritual structures situated there. The grounds, in historical depiction, were analysed on the basis of the following methods: cultural evolutionism, positivism, structuralism, and also hermeneutics and phenomenology. Gradually, the attention was paid to the new research problems: distances between graves, directions of the burial grounds’ development, establishing their inner and outer boundaries, settlement of ritual structures (hearths, funeral pyres, concentration of pottery and stones) and the tradition of using the space of burial grounds in later historical periods. The conclusions presented in the paper show that the biography of archaeological structures, such as burial grounds, is initiated in primeval history but is completed by other generations of observers and researchers of those relics. Their space „text” is unceasingly read and interpreted.
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