Severin Fowles

Worlds otherwise: Archaeology, anthropology, and ontological difference

The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation—a format we maintain here because, among other things, it permits a welcome level of candor and simplicity. In this forum we present two questions (written by Alberti and Witmore, along with the concluding comments) and the responses of five of the Theoretical Archaeology Group session participants. The first question asks why we think an ontological approach is important to our respective fields; the second, building upon the first set of responses, asks authors to consider the difference that pluralizing ontology might make and whether such a move is desirable given the aims of archaeology and anthropology. While several angles on ontology come through in the conversation, all share an interest in more immanent understandings that arise within specific situations and that are perhaps best described as thoroughly entangled rather than transcendent and/or oppositional in any straightforward sense.

People Without Things

It is easy to understand the puzzlement of colleagues who are unsure what to make of the increasing number of anthropologists who bemoan anthropocentrism. We can forgive their sideways glances when they hear that social scientists are “now look[ing] to gain maturity by burying the corpse of our imperial majesty: society” (Miller 2005: 37). Or when they learn that posthumanism is a growing project in the humanities (Wolfe 2003). Or that the latest iteration of phenomenology has little to do with people and is instead concerned with how objects perceive one another (Harman 2005).

Clay, Conflict, and Village Aggregation: Compositional Analyses of Pre-Classic Pottery from Taos, New México

As was the case throughout much of north-central New Mexico, the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked a period of rapid settlement pattern change in the Taos District as dispersed pithouse and small pueblo hamlets were replaced by tightly clustered pueblos and ultimately by the emergence of large aggregated villages. Here we consider the effects of this transition on the manner in which local potters procured raw clay for the production of black-on-white ceramics. Adopting the Rio Grande del Rancho drainage as our study area, we first outline the major clay sources within the drainage. We then report on neutron activation and petrographic analyses of both modern clays as well as archaeological ceramics from sites that span the settlement transition in question. These analyses suggest that settlement aggregation was accompanied by a noticeable reduction in the diversity and quality of clay sources used by local potters, most likely as a result of newly restricted procurement strategies associated with the formation of buffer zones between village aggregates. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of this trend with respect to the economic situation of early large villages in the area.

The perfect subject (postcolonial object studies)

This article argues that the late 20th-century tradition of material culture studies, as well as its more recent object-oriented offspring, emerged as a response to the 1980s crisis of representation and the deeper postcolonial critiques that accompanied this crisis. As it became more and more difficult to study and make claims about non-Western people, anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines began to explore the advantages of treating non-human objects as quasi-human subjects. Things proved safer to study than people and the popularity of ‘thing theory’ grew, at least in part, for this very reason. More importantly, the analytical shift of focus from people to things had the effect of salvaging – and, indeed, greatly amplifying – the representational authority of Western scholars at the precise moment when that authority seemed to be evaporating.

Gesture and performance in Comanche rock art

Abstract This paper examines a corpus of rock art images produced by ancestral Comanches during the early eighteenth century. The images were lightly scratched and the gestures that produced them left behind only the faintest of traces. With careful study, one can read these traces, organize them into icons, and interpret them as finished products. Yet in doing so one obscures the core logic that made the rock art a potent mode of expression within Comanche society. Indeed, the primary ‘image’, we propose, was not the scratched icon left behind, but instead the gestural hand and body movements of the rock art as a performative event. This proposition leads us into a broader consideration of mimetic performance, the sociality of rock art, and the role of image production in the careers of Comanche warriors.