Pottery Agents: A Case Study of Nonhuman Beings from the American Southwest

Summary

Since the enlightenment western approaches to material culture have distinguished between natural and supernatural processes. This demarcation produces archaeological perspectives at odds with ethnographically known cultures and likely past ones. Contemporary Native American ontologies emphasize the animacy of things such as architecture and pottery. An important theoretical question therefore, is what social relationships did people establish with material objects, and how did these associations change through time? Theory based on this approach to material culture would dramatically impact a range of fundamental archaeological assumptions about analytical categories. In this paper we offer a case study from the American Southwest focused on the life history of mortuary practices involved with placing ritually broken pottery vessels (i.e. kill holes) with the dead. Starting with the Hohokam in the 10th century, we trace this custom through its apex with the Mimbres during the 11th century and beyond in various prehistoric populations including the Anasazi, Mogollon, and Salado into the historic period at Hopi and Zuni. We then explore the implications of this tradition for study of past object agency and the significance of considering indigenous ontologies. We argue that these mortuary vessels likely existed as nonhuman beings in their own right.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Mediating Spirit Worlds in Native North America

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