Stanisław Tabaczyński, a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, passed away in November 2020. He was one of the most influential theoreticians of
archaeology in post-War Poland. He developed an original concept of the archaeological process at the junction of the Annales school, the Poznań methodological school, and the inspirations from the Italian academic milieu cantered around the Polish-Italian Interdisciplinary Working Taskforce of Applied Sciences in Archaeology and Protection of Cultural Patrimony. Its main components comprised long-term processes, ethnogenetic processes, and the polisemantisation of culture. He understood archaeology as the anthropology of the prehistoric past, outstretched between anthropology and history. He participated and ran numerous excavation projects in Poland and abroad. These comprised excavation campaigns carried out in the large-scale Millennium Research project in Poznań, Wrocław, Biskupin, Kołobrzeg, Grody Czerwieńskie and Nakło nad Notecią. His major achievement was the excavation of the early Medieval Sandomierz. He discovered a glassmaking workshop of the 7–8th centuries on Torcello Island in the Venice Lagoon and participated in numerous field projects in Italy, France, and Algieria. He is the author of numerous books and articles. Among his most important publications are three-volume Theory and Practice of Archaeological Research, Przeszłość społeczna [The Social Past], Neolit środkowoeuropejski. Podstawy gospodarcze [Central European Neolithic. The economic foundations] and Archeologia średniowieczna – Problemy. Źródła, metody. Cele badawcze [Medieval Archaeology. Issues, Sources, Methods, and Research Objectives].

Units of measurement appear as media of social confl ict in Witold Kula’s seminal study on metrication. Given the current discussions around political epistemology, Kula’s treatment of metrology is telling. He turns the supposedly neutral auxiliary science of weights and measures into a matter of concern. The reception of his concepts in the West is outlined (history of historical metrology, the Annales school, and the history of science), and the potential of this social history of measurement in times of accelerated data production is evaluated.