Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeological heritage of the Southwest is brilliantly colored. People here made and valued richly decorated pottery, vividly colored stone tools and ornaments, brightly pigmented textiles and perishable artifacts, and painted wall and rock panels. They used color not just to brighten the world, but to signal social identity, carry political messages, convey knowledge, connect to places and landscapes, and establish systems of ritual symbolism. Color is also a key attribute that archaeologists use in our research, from our Munsell books to typologies of pottery, glass and beads, to the identification of lithic materials. Archaeologists constantly rely on color to establish cultural affiliation and seriation, to analyze artifacts, and to interpret sites. Despite its importance to our work, the use and meaning of color has not been widely examined in archaeological thought and theory. This symposium explores the archaeology of color in the Southwestern U.S. and Northern Mexico. The papers in this session will consider the meaning of color in the lives and ideologies of past people, the resources and technologies people used to add color to their material culture, and how archaeologists use color to study aspects of the past such as social identity and cultural interaction.