Complicating the Religious/Secular Dichotomy Through Object Biographies: An Investigation of Mesa Verde Style Mugs

Summary

Scholars acknowledge that religious and secular rituals are difficult to distinguish. This is especially true in the archaeological record, where human beliefs and worldviews must be understood through material correlates. In order to make categories simpler to use, Western scholars have tended to dichotomize religious and secular. Exploring the role of Mesa Verde style mugs in the Ancestral Puebloan world, this paper takes an object biography approach and acknowledges that boundaries between religious and secular practices are not always clear cut. Researchers tend to consider Mesa Verde style mugs an object used primarily in religious ritual contexts. However, their investigations have assumed an unnecessary dichotomy between domestic/secular and religious/ceremonial uses. By using an object biography approach, I work to collapse the boundaries between religious and secular practices and show that mugs had multiple roles in the lives of Ancestral Puebloan people.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21573