Material signs and relational meanings: reconsidering Ancestral Pueblo material dichotomies

ABSTRACT

Using archaeological materials from the pre-Hispanic American Southwest, we explore how insights from both new materialism/posthumanism and Peircean semiotics enrich our understanding of object meanings. We highlight two artefact classes commonly found in contexts interpreted as ritual: avian osteological remains and red pigment. Drawing on archaeological evidence and a rich ethnographic record, we consider their diverse associations and uses with regard to their positions within relational assemblages and their qualities as material signs. Focusing specifically on the increase in avian remains in the Middle Rio Grande region in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the association of red pigment with lapidary production in Chaco Canyon in the tenth to twelfth centuries, we identify how these materials are linked to disparate objects and contexts through iconicity and indexicality. We point to the relational constitution of object meaning as confounding analytical taxonomies that are traditionally applied to these materials.

KEYWORDS:

• Birds
• red ochre
• ontology
• new materialism
• peircean semiotics
• assemblage theory

Acknowledgments

Our most sincere thanks to editors Edward Swenson and Craig Cipolla, as well as to two anonymous reviewers, whose comments significantly improved this paper. We would also like to thank Asia Alsgaard, Caitlin Ainsworth, Cyler Conrad, Eden Franz, Scott Kirk, and Jana Valesca Meyer for analytical support. We are grateful to Theresa Sterner for photographing the Pueblo Bonito artefacts and providing insight into jewellery manufacturing methods. Thanks are due to David Hurst Thomas and Anna Semon of the American Museum of Natural History and James Krakker of the National Museum of Natural History for providing access to the collections. A special thanks to Anna Semon for her help keeping artefact analyses running smoothly. Portions of the analyses presented here were supported by the National Science Foundation (faunal analyses, National Science Foundation Grant No. 1732622) and by the University of New Mexico’s Department of Anthropology (lapidary tool analyses).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Throughout the paper, the use of the term object in a semiotic sense (vs. the more general employment of the word as referring to a material thing) is distinguished through single quotation marks (‘object’).

2. Here we refer to ontology as a culturally specific understanding of reality, which entails alternate perspectives on the nature of the world and the beings that inhabit it, rather than the more general philosophical, metaphysical, and universal uses of the term. In this regard, we employ the word in a manner consistent with Cipolla’s (2019, 616) description of a ‘worldview-focused’ type of ontological inquiry.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [1732622]; University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology [n/a].

Notes on contributors

Hannah V. Mattson

Hannah Mattson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the archaeology of the pre-Hispanic American Southwest, material culture studies with a focus on pottery and personal ornaments, and issues surrounding social identity, ritual practice, craft production, and adornment.

Emily Lena Jones

Emily Lena Jones is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. She is a zooarchaeologist who studies human-animal relationships in a variety of times and places, including the pre-Hispanic and historic American Southwest/Mexican Northwest.