7 - When is a symbol archaeologically meaningful?: meaning, function, and prehistoric visual arts

Summary

Background and goals

Post–processual archaeology has demanded that attention be directed to the symbolic systems that played important roles in prehistoric lives, but few methods of accessing symbolic systems have been developed. Certain aspects of symbolic systems are available to archaeological study, notably visual arts. This paper examines one kind of role that symbolic systems played in prehistory in order to address an on–going discussion in the archaeology of the proto–historic period in the American Southwest.

Most of those now working at large, late Pueblo sites in Arizona, such as Grasshopper, Homol'ovi, Awatovi, and Chavez Pass, are addressing the problem of what happens to social organization of village farming communities during the process of population aggregation and agricultural intensification. Controversy arose between those who think fourteenth century Puebloans had complex social organization, that is, social differentiation based on wealth and political power (Plog 1983, Upham 1982), and those who think pueblo society was more or less egalitarian and based on complicated ritual interaction and leadership based in religious authority (Reid 1989b: 87, Adams 1991). In the latter view, access to religious knowledge and authority might be inherited, but there is no social stratification, and no differential access to the means of production. This paper attempts to show that visual arts deserve more attention in attacking this problem, and that a cross–cultural comparative approach is useful.