Clothing the World in a Social Skin: Recognizing the Role of Materialities of Dressing and Metaphor in the Ancient North American Southwest

Summary

Scholars have suggested that the process of dressing both animates and ascribes identities to inanimate things. During the thirteenth century, people in the Mesa Verde region of the North American Southwest conceptually dressed special structures, pottery, baskets, and even cotton garments in similar ways. These diverse media were often adorned with clothing depictions and woven textile designs, painted on a white clay-coated background. Grounded both physically and conceptually in bodily experiences, these dressings covered the raw forms of containers with substances of transformation and concealment, and painted with similar stylistic decorations as found in each of the other media, all of which were ultimately grounded metaphorically in cotton textile and basketry decorative cannons. Through conceptual metaphor, ideas about human bodies and appropriate ways to clothe them were transferred onto, and blended with, other material domains. These materials were connected by action of practice—the act of being dressed, and connected in materialities of metaphor and clothing. As clothing did for people, dressing buildings and other containers allowed them to become socially embodied persons, and to be linked conceptually to containers in other media. This presentation discusses recent research mapping networks of materialities of clothing and ritual practice across time and space.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Understanding Visual Culture Without Textual Sources: What Are the Possibilities for Analysis?

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