“THE LOGIC OF THEIR WAYS:” TYPOLOGIZING ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-09-28

Ancestral Puebloans and their descendants of the northern American Southwest share a distinctive existential logic that includes a ubiquitous anthropomorphism. Ethnographic research has provided a rich repository of data that ties such imagery to sociopolitical roles of longue durée. Although still the object of criticism in archaeology, the use of data from the historic period does not need to be seen as too tainted by associations with colonialism, or as exercises in overly optimistic imaginings. Such criticisms serve only to assuage the unease of those who view “science-based” fact as one requiring legalistic “proofs.” A cognitive archaeology solves such dilemmas through the use of typologies. Archaeologists, of course, are in the unique position of being typologists par excellence. I propose such a method to meet the requirements of “proofs” through analysis of the material culture of the late 13th Century Sand Canyon Pueblo of southwestern Colorado. Sand Canyon harkens back to the Pueblo past of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, an area equal in complexity to the great agricultural civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Middle East. As it is human nature to typologize experience through anthropomorphic associations, typology also serves as a process that finds connections between symbolic entanglements based on such foundations. The ancient record becomes evidence of what Clifford Geertz states as both a “display of internal logic,” and, “the logic of their ways.” Sand Canyon’s material culture offers up a remarkably congruent example of a bridge between pasts, an evolution of complexity, and durability of the same logic into the 21st century. Its insights suggest a useful approach for typologizing “thought” in archaeology generally.


Author(s): van Roggen, Judith (Okanagan College, Kelowna, British Columbia; The University of British Columbia Okanagan)