ortman scott, conceptual metaphor in the archeological record - methods and

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Conceptual Metaphor in the Archaeological Record: Methods and an Example from theAmerican SouthwestAuthor(s): Scott G. OrtmanSource: American Antiquity, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Oct., 2000), pp. 613-645Published by: Society for American ArchaeologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2694419 .Accessed: 04/03/2014 07:23

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CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD: METHODS AND AN EXAMPLE FROM THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST

Scott G. Ortman

This paper attempts to unify recent theorizing on cultutr-ail m7eaning in material culture using the notion of conceptual metaphor Research in several disciplines suggests that conventional metcaphorical concepts are central to cultural cogniition. Ethnographic studies an2d psychological experiments inidicate that coniceptual metcaphors are expressed in numnerous forms of human expression, inicluding speech, ritual, narrative, and miaterial culture. Generalizations on the natutre and structure of metaphor emerg- ingfrom cognitive linguistic research can be used to develop methocdsfor reconstrulcting ancient netcaphorsfrom archaeological evidence. In a pr eliminaitv cpplication, I argute that pottery designs fromi2 the Mesa Verde region of the American Southwest were conceptualized as textile fabrics, and suggest that conniections between these media der-ivedfron7 a worldview grounded in container imagery. The ability to decipher coniceptuial metaphors in prehistoric material culture opens up many n?ew avenues for resear-ch, including the role of worldview in cultural evolution, an2d the discovery of cultural continuities between archaeological cultures and historic ethnolinguistic groups.

Este artfculo trata de un2ificar recienites teor-fas sobre el significado cultural de la cultura material usanido la nocion de metifora conceptutal. Investigacionies en varias disciplinias sugieren que los coniceptos mnetaf6ricos convencionales son centrales en la cog- nicion cultural. Estudios etnogrificos y experimentos psicologicos indican que las metaforas conceptuales estan expresadas en variasformas de expresi6n humana, incluyendo lengucje, rituial, narr-ativa, y cultura material. Las generalizaciones sobre la nat- uraleza y estr-uictur-a de la metifora que emergen de la investigaci6n lingluistica cognitiva pueden usarse para desarrollar meto- dos para reconstruir mietdforas antiguas a partir de la evidencia arqueol6gica. En una aplicacion preliminar arguyo que los diseihos cerdmicos de la regi6n de Mesa Verde en el suroeste norteamnericanofuieron conceptiualizados como textiles, y sugiero que las conecciones entre estos miiedios den-ivani de utwa perspectiva aniclada en imagenqes de conitenedores. La abilidad de decifrar metdforas coniceptuales en. Ia cultura material prehist6rica abte nuevas avenidas para la investigaci6n, inicluyendo el descubrim- iento cle continutidades culturales entr-e las cuiltlitrcs arqueol6gicas y los grupos etniolinguisticos hist6ricos.

T his paper develops a methodology through which some of the cultural meanings embedded in archaeological material culture might

be deciphered, and applies it to the ancient Puebloan occupation of the Mesa Verde region in the Ameri- can Southwest. My approach is grounded in culTent understandings of mental imagery in psychology and linguistics, especially a cognitive phenomenon known as conceptual metaphor. The traditional view of metaphor sees it as a purely linguistic embellish- ment that is of little consequence for theories of language and thought. In reality, conventional metaphorical concepts are systematically expressed in everyday discourse and reveal the fundamentally poetic nature of cultural cognition. In addition, conceptual metaphor is an image-based, nonlinguistic

phenomenon that is expressed in material culture as well as language. In this paper, I argue that archaeologists can reconstruct ancient conceptual metaphors by examining the structure of figurative expressions in archaeological material culture, and by following a code-breaking procedure similar to that used in the decipherment of ancient scripts. Based on the results presented here, I suggest that research on metaphor in material culture holds great promise for prehistoric archaeology.

Theoretical Background The notion that cultural cognition is figurative, and especially metaphorical in nature, has a long history in anthropology. Frank Hamilton Cushing, one of the founders of participant observation, wrote "I have

Scott G. Ortman * Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, 23390 County Road K, Cortez, CO 81321

American Antiquity, 65(4), 2000, pp. 613-645 Copyright ( 2000 by the Society for American Archaeology

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614 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY [Vol. 65, No. 4, 2000

found the Zuni argues actual and essential relationship from similarity in the appearance, function, or other attributes of even generically diverse things" (1886:510-5 11). This conclusion was also reached by Boas (1911:73), who commented on "the use of metaphorical terms in poetry, which, in rituals, are taken literally, and are made the basis of certain rites." Levy-Bruhl (1926) argued that non-Western modes of thinking were "prelogical" because they focused more on analogical correspondences and relationships grounded in a "law of participation" than on the objective, logical consistency supposedly char- acteristic of "civilized" rationality. Finally, Levi- Strauss (1966), despite his critique of Levy-Bruhl, nevertheless agreed with him on the point that "savage" thought is essentially analogical in character.

Many anthropologists have dismissed these early attempts to understand the "savage mind" because they contrast analogical native thought with the supposedly logical, objective thought of Westerners. These views have also been criticized as implying a radical cultural relativism that is anathema to social science (e.g., Brown 1991). Surely all humans have brains that work the same way that ours' do, so the argument goes (for a history of the "psychic unity" debate, see Shore 1996:Chapter 1). In recent years cognitive anthropologists have begun to tread a middle path between these two poles, arguing that differences in cultural cognition do not derive from different mechanisms of thought, but from different conceptualizations of the world (Fernandez 1986, 1991; Gumperz and Levinson 1996; Keesing 1987; Levinson 1996; Palmer 1996; Salmon 1999; Shore 1996). These conceptualizations are in fact figurative, as early anthropologists noted, but are usually taken as literal by participants in a culture, including our own. In short, figurative thought is basic and univer- sal, but the domains of experience used in figurative conceptualizations vary significantly, although not without limit or regularity, across cultures.

Numerous ethnographic studies illustrate how conceptual metaphors, which enable one thing to be understood and experienced in terms of another, are expressed in various forms of cultural behavior (for a recent review, see Tilley 1999). Several of these studies (Bird-David 1990, 1992; Bourdieu 1973, 1990:271-283; David et al. 1988; MacKenzie 1991; Preston Blier 1987; Shore 1996:Chapter 11; Sillar 1996; Tilley 1999:Chapter 4; Turner 1991; Walens 1981) show that metaphors are revealed in multiple

modes of expression, from everyday speech, to the structure of ritual, to events in sacred narratives, to the production, form, and use of artifacts. 1 This diver- sity indicates that metaphor is not merely a matter of poetic language, but rather is a matter of thought, which precedes and shapes language as well as other forms of communication. In short, conventional metaphorical concepts form the foundations of cultural understandings, and are created and transmit- ted among beings with fundamentally poetic minds.

The Potential of Metaphor in Archaeology

Within archaeology, several theorists from seem- ingly disparate schools of thought are beginning to converge on metaphor as an important concept for inferring the cultural meanings encoded in artifacts. This trend follows from Colin Renfrew's promotion of "cognitive-processual archaeology" (Renfrew 1994, 1998). One aspect of Renfrew's program, the examination of "pre-modern" modes of thinking (Renfrew 1994:5), has recently gained momentum (see Renfrew and Scarre 1998) through the work of Merlin Donald (1991, 1998a), who argues that cognition has continued to evolve in modern humans, despite minimal genetic change, through the development of technologies for extending biological memory. Donald focuses on the emergence of speech and literacy in his work, but recognizes that over the course of prehistory humans have developed ever more complex means of storing collec- tive knowledge outside the brain using symbolic material culture. Thus, artifacts, as expressions of cultural knowledge and as mnemonic devices rein- forcing it in the minds of their makers, gradually freed human cognition from the memory capacities of individual brains.

Donald (1998b: 187) argues that a central issue for cognitive archaeology is exactly how symbolic artifacts store memory, and exactly what it is that they "store." On the basis of ethnographic studies, he suggests that, rather than storing information in the strict logical form of a computer, artifacts encode cultural knowledge in a fuzzy or analogical way, following a "principle of perceptual and action-metaphor" (1998b:186). Donald's comments suggest that metaphor is a possible solution to the problem of how artifacts achieve "external symbolic storage" in cognitive archaeology.

Metaphor is also migrating toward the center of post-processual theory. For example, in his recent


Ortman] CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD 615

book Metaphor and Material Culture, Christopher Tilley (1999) provides a wide-ranging overview of the literature on metaphor in the social sciences and makes a strong theoretical case that metaphor is central to the way meaning and memory are encoded in artifacts. To this end, the most powerful body of evidence reviewed by Tilley (1999:16-19) is that emerging from experimental psychology and linguistics. This evidence stands out for two reasons. First, researchers in these fields are explicitly scientific in outlook and are committed to conducting experiments and formulating theories that are consistent with empirical results (see especially Gibbs 1994; Lakoff 1991, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Sec- ond, unlike early anthropologists, these researchers have focused on the ways figurative thought is revealed in everyday English and have built on native-speaker intuitions in developing subtle and sophisticated experimental designs.2 The results of such studies have convinced several cognitive anthropologists (e.g., Palmer 1996; Salmon 1999; Shore 1996; Sweetser 1990) that metaphor is a central cognitive process, and I believe this evidence might con- vince cognitive archaeologists as well. That cognitive and post-processual archaeology might converge on metaphor as a common explanatory concept is a striking thought, especially given their radically different philosophical orientations.

The Methodological Challenge. But even if it were accepted by all that "people do encode metaphorical meanings into things" (Tilley 1999:76), operationalizing metaphor theory in archaeology would still pose a significant methodological challenge. Ethnographic studies of metaphor in material culture are usually grounded in linguistic data relat- ing to artifacts, and such data are not available to archaeologists. It is one thing to claim that metaphor is central to the meaning of material culture, but it is quite another to claim that archaeologists can reconstruct ancient metaphors from the archaeological record alone.

This problem becomes even more tricky when it is accepted that anthropologists use metaphor in conceptualizing and writing about other cultures just as much as native subjects do in understanding their own worlds. Functionalists conceptualize society as an "organism"; interpretivists, culture as "text"; structuralists, culture as "syntax"; and sociobiolo- gists, culture as a collection of "memes" (genes). The fact that metaphorical conceptualizations underlie

anthropological theories does not necessarily make them less valid or useful. In the end, we have no choice but to think metaphorically about complex social phenomena. But since both analysts and arti- fact-makers think metaphorically, the fundamental question is how to determine which metaphors are created in the mind of the analyst, and which ones characterized ancient minds (Tilley 1999:36).

Both cognitive-processual and post-processual research programs require us to answer this question somehow, but unfortunately, previous attempts to reconstruct ancient metaphors from archaeological evidence have not been able to escape problems posed by the absence of native informants. A notable example is Ian Hodder's (1990, 1992, 1994) argument that the chamber tombs of Neolithic Europe were conceptualized by their builders as "houses for the dead." In developing his argument, Hodder (1990:142-156) lists eight correspondences between Neolithic houses and tombs, including similarities in the dimensions, shapes, orientations, and uses of houses and tombs; the clustering of both in "settle- ments," and the common siting of tombs on top of earlier houses. These correspondences make Hod- der's interpretation seem plausible, but how could we distinguish between his interpretation and others we might imagine, say, that Neolithic tomb-builders copied house-floor plans simply because they had no other architectural models to work with. How might we establish, without asking the builders themselves, whether these correspondences truly reflect ancient metaphors as opposed to some more mun- dane phenomenon?

I believe the best way to overcome the native tes- timony problem is to consider psychological and linguistic research on figurative thought more closely, and focus on generalizations concerning the structure of metaphor emerging from this research. This literature is considered below and will ground the methodology of the case study.

What Is Metaphor, Really? The most systematic research to date on the nature of metaphor has been conducted by researchers in a relatively new school of linguistics known as cognitive linguistics. The goal of this field is to develop a theory of human language that is consistent with what is generally known about the mind and brain from disciplines other than linguistics. Many archaeologists probably have some acquaintance with gen-



erative linguistics (e.g., Chomsky 1986; Pinker 1994), which argues that humans possess a relatively autonomous "language organ" and focuses on the ways linguistic symbols are arranged in grammatical sentences. Cognitive linguistics, in contrast, con- siders language to be inextricably bound up with broader psychological processes and focuses more on how people actually understand each other in the context of natural discourse (Fauconnier 1997; Lakoff 1991; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Langacker 1991; Regier 1996). Since the acquisition and use of language derives from bodily experience, and this experience is filtered through nonlinguistic processes, including perception, imagery, and memory, language should systematically reflect these broader psychological mechanisms. As a result, cognitive linguists study language but gain insight into the deeper workings of an embodied mind.

I suggest that research findings in cognitive linguistics can help archaeologists develop methods through which ancient conceptual metaphors might be deciphered from archaeological evidence. Anthro- pologists, especially Boas (Aberle 1960), Sapir (1994), and Levi-Strauss (Leach 1970, 1976), have often looked to linguistics for theoretical foundations, but in recent years possible relationships between language and material culture have been questioned by researchers who have documented the inadequacy of "design grammars" in accounting for material-culture variation (Hardin 1983; McCracken 1987). I suggest that it is the adoption of generative views of language in these studies, and not the con- nection between language and material culture, that is flawed. The appropriate aspect of language on which theoretical analogies should be built is semantics, not syntax. Cognitive, linguistics focuses on semantics, and I believe a closer look at research in this field can give archaeology the foundation it needs for a more appropriate analogy between language and material culture.

Three basic findings of cognitive linguistics are important for this paper. First, both language and thought are grounded in mental imagery, or "mental representations that begin as conceptual analogs of immediate, perceptual experience," including vision, touch, taste, smell, hearing, and emotional states (Palmer 1996:47). Second, the unique human ability for producing, transferring, and processing meaning occurs through mappings, or structured sets of correspondences between domains of mental

imagery (Fauconnier 1997). Third, although many different mapping mechanisms are known, conceptual metaphor is the most common and important kind (Gibbs 1994; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Sweetser 1990).

To get an idea of what conceptual metaphor is, consider the numerous everyday expressions in Eng- lish that use the terminology ofjourneys to talk about life experiences ("I need to move forward," "he's a lost soul," "we're finally getting where we want to be," "our relationship crashed and burned," etc.). These are all surface expressions of an underlying, nonlinguistic metaphorical conceptualization that can be succinctly described using the familiar idiom, LIFE IS A JOURNEY (small capitals are used to denote metaphorical concepts, after Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In this metaphor, the source domain is ajour- ney, with a starting point, intended goals, obstacles to overcome, and a destination; and the target domain, onto which the conceptual structure of this source is mapped, is life, something that is more difficult to conceptualize directly from bodily experience. In metaphor, the perceivable properties and relations of the target domain correspond, point for point, with properties of the source domain. People do not normally notice that they are expressing a metaphorical thought when they say things like "my career has come a long way," "I' m stuck in a bad mar- riage," or "I'm headed in a new direction," but Eng- lish speakers immediately understand the meaning of such statements because they have internalized the metaphorical concept LIFE IS A JOURNEY, and use it to conceptualize life experiences and communicate about them using metaphorical expressions.

Genercal Properties of Metcaphor

Careful analysis of large numbers of conventional metaphorical expressions has revealed several general properties of conceptual metaphor. Although everyday English expressions provide a convenient means of illustrating these properties, it is critical to keep in mind that figurative language is merely a surface expression of an underlying metaphorical conceptual system, and there is no formal difference between metaphor as revealed by linguistic expressions and metaphor as revealed by other modes of human action, including the production and use of material culture (Fauconnier 1997:Chapter 1; Lakoff 1993). The six properties reviewed in this section refer to metaphor as a cognitive process involving



mental imagery, which is nonlinguistic in nature. These properties are critical because they can help archaeologists determine how archaeological expressions of conceptual metaphor should behave.

Directionality. The first property is that metaphorical mappings are directional. The source domains of metaphor are usually grounded in concrete physical experience, whereas target domains tend to be more abstract. Metaphor enables our partial knowledge of a relatively abstract phenomenon to be organized into a coherent image-schema or gestalt structure using a more concrete source, which facil- itates reasoning and communicating about that phenomenon (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:56-68; 1999:Chapter 4). In conceptual metaphor, these mappings are asymmetrical, which means that abstract domains are not used to conceptualize domains that are already fairly concrete. For example, "spring is still a long way off" and "the millennium is finally behind us" express the conventional metaphor TIME IS SPACE, with physical space as the source and time as the target. In this way of conceptualizing time, future events are in front of a person, past events are behind, physical distance correlates with the "amount" of time between two events, and so on (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:Chapter 10). In contrast, it is nonsensical to say something like "the ball is future of me" (with the intended meaning "the ball is in front of me") as there are no expressions in everyday English or in any other language that express SPACE IS TIME. People do not do this because we already have a direct bodily expelience of space, and it does not facilitate our understanding of space to conceptualize it as time.

The Superordinate Principle. This second property follows from the way human beings categorize perceptual input into kinds of experience. Much of our direct experiential knowledge is organized in mental imagery as basic-level categories (Lakoff 1987; Rosch 1978; Varela et al. 1991), which represent the most inclusive level of abstraction that can be represented by a concrete image in the mind. Basic-level categories maximize the correlational structure of our direct interactions with the world, and are the first categories to be learned and named by children (Rosch et al. 1976). More complex cat- egorizations that organize a mature person's knowledge consist largely of subsets and supersets of basic-level categories. In English, chairs and birds are basic- level categories because the average per-

son can conjure up a mental image of a prototype for these concepts. Furniture and animals, in contrast, are superordinate-level categolies because there is no single prototype for these concepts that can be imaged in the mind (for an application of prototype theory in material culture studies, see Miller 1985).

It turns out that metaphorical expressions utilize basic-level categories that are easy to image, while the actual metaphorical concepts that generate these varied expressions occur at the superordinate level (Lakoff 1993). For example, in linguistic expressions of LIFE IS A JOURNEY, such as "my plans have been derailed," the life is usually described as a car, train, boat, or plane attempting to reach a destination, but the general mapping from which all these specific expressions derive involves the superordinate category vehicle.

The Invariance Principle. This third property states that the portion of the source that is mapped onto the target preserves the image-schematic structure of the target and does not contradict it (Lakoff 1990, 1993). When aspects of the source and target domain do not correspond, the target overrides and limits those aspects of the source that can be mapped onto it. For example, the metaphor TIME IS MONEY is commonly used in our culture, as when we think about "budgeting," "saving "borrowing," or "wast- ing" time (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:Chapter 10). However, not all aspects of our knowledge of money are used in conceptualizing time. When we put money in a savings account, this money usually accumulates interest, such that the balance of the account grows over time, even if we do not add to the principal. But no one would argue that if we set aside some time now for retirement that we will miracu- lously have more time at retirement than we directly set aside for it. This aspect of our experience of money is not mapped onto time, because we experience time passing at a consistent, irreversible rate, and know that we cannot accumulate time in the same way saved money accumulates interest. The invariance principle accounts for these kinds of restrictions on metaphorical mappings. Aspects of the source domain (principal accumulates interest) that contradict the structure of the target domain (time passes at a consistent, irreversible rate) are not mapped.

The Constitutive Principle. The fourth property is that conventional metaphorical concepts are constitutive of thought (Gibbs 1994; Lakoff and John-



son 1980, 1999; Reddy 1993). Many social, psychological, and cosmological domains, conceptualized metaphorically, are taken as literally true by participants in a culture, and structure normal, unreflective thinking. For example, Lakoff (1987:Chap- ter 11-15) has shown that Western philosophers and scientists have traditionally conceptualized analyti- cal categories as containers. In this metaphor, the properties of a container as a bounded, physical entity are used not only to describe, but also to reason about, the classification of entities in the world. This is why classical categories contain entities that can be inside or outside of the category, but cannot be both; and the classical syllogism (If X is in A and A is in B, then X is in B) is true because it follows from the physical properties of nested containers.

The world does not necessarily have this structure, but CATEGORIES ARE CONTAINERS iS so deeply embedded in Western culture that it is often assumed without introspection to represent objective reality "out there" in the world. To put this another way, the ontological (what is) correspondences implied by conventional metaphors define epistemic (what you can know) correspondences, which enable people to reason about a target domain using the structure of the mapped source domain. In fact, it is nearly impossible to think about most of our basic concepts without metaphor. Our literal understandings of concepts such as life, love, time, communication, causation, the self, and the cosmos are actually quite impover- ished. Metaphor helps us flesh out these concepts so we can think about them in more detail (Lakoff and Johnson 1999).

Blended Sources. The fifth property of metaphor derives from what Fauconnier and Turner (1994) call "middle spaces." In metaphor, the projection of source domain structure onto the target domain is motivated by a "generic" mental space that defines points of correspondence between the two domains at a higher level of abstraction (as in the superordinate principle). This generic space governs the projection of conceptual structure from the more concrete source onto the more abstract target. But there is an important wrinkle here. Fauconnier and Turner (1994; Fauconnier 1997:Chapter 6) have shown that generic spaces can also be set up between two domains with relatively equal conceptual structure. In such cases, conceptual structure is not projected asymmetrically from the better known source to the lesser known target, because neither domain

is any more concrete than the other. Instead, conceptual structure from both domains is projected into a new "blended space" that combines details of both in an emergent structure.

An example of conceptual blending can be seen in the statement, "Mark McGuire finally beat Roger Maris at the end of the 1998 season." A literal read- ing of this statement implies that Maris and McGuire were in a home-run competition during the 1998 baseball season, which is impossible because Maris has been dead for many years. However, since both McGuire's and Maris' record-setting seasons share the generic structure of a baseball season, and both have relatively equal inherent conceptual structure, both seasons can be projected onto a blended space in which it becomes coherent to think of the two in direct, contemporaneous competition.

Blended spaces are critical for two reasons. First, blended spaces can form new source domains for more complex metaphorical projections (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:49). Second, blended spaces have emergent structure that is often physically impossible, but conceptually coherent (Fauconnier and Turner 1994). Through blended spaces, conceptual metaphor can become something more than a detailed mapping of real-world perceptual structure from source to target. With blended source domains, metaphor can map conceptual structure that exists only in the mind and has never existed in the objective, real world. Blended spaces are critical for the decipherment of ancient metaphors because they give archaeologists a means of going beyond physical, real-world correspondences and into the realm of purely conceptual relationships.

The Experiential Principle. The sixth and final property is that conceptual metaphor is grounded in bodily experience. An extensive body of research supports the conclusion that mental imagery is deeply rooted in the circuitry of perception (Damasio 1994; Finke 1989; Kosslyn 1996; Tootell et al. 1988). As a result, metaphors only make sense when speakers have some experiential, perceptual knowledge of the source and target domains that are linked metaphorically. In addition, novel metaphorical expressions usually flow from the details of a person's experience of the source and target domains.

For example, in recent years the notion of a computer virus has emerged as a means of conceptualizing destructive computer programs written by malevolent programmers. The person or persons who



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Figure 1. The Mesa Verde region. Numbered sites mark provenience of selected collections in Table 4. C) Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

invented this metaphor must have had fairly detailed knowledge of both viruses and computers, since computer viruses "infect" other computers through the transfer of data, they produce "symptoms" in the affected machines, and computers can be "disin- fected" or "immunized" against future "contamina- tion" (see Fauconnier 1997:18-25). Furthermore, this metaphor would be utterly nonsensical to some- one who had no notion of what viruses and computers were and how they worked. Thus, direct experiential knowledge is an important ingredient in the invention and understanding of novel metaphorical concepts and expressions.

The six properties of conceptual metaphor reviewed in this section are essential to developing a methodology that can determine whether correspondences between different classes of material culture, or between artifacts and other phenomena experienced by ancient people, derived from metaphor or from something else. In particular, they place significant restrictions on how metaphorical concepts should be expressed in archaeological mate-

rial culture. Let us now take a look at how these properties play out in a concrete example.

The Textile Metaphor in Mesa Verde Pottery Painting

To illustrate how cognitive linguistic research can help archaeologists decipher ancient metaphors from the archaeological record, I present a case study that proposes a metaphor that characterized the minds of ancient Puebloans in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest. More specifically, I focus on the Great Pueblo Period (A.D. 1060-1280) occupation of the Mesa Verde region, in southwest Col- orado and southeast Utah (Figure 1; Lipe 1995; Varien et al. 1996; Wilshusen et al. 1997).3

My proposal builds on the correspondence many archaeologists have noticed between painted pottery designs and woven textiles in this region. This cor- relation was first noticed more than a century ago. William Henry Holmes wrote in 1886 that "Nine- tenths of archaic Pueblo, ceramic, ornamental designs are traceable to the textile art, and all show



the influence of textile convention" (1886:247). A few years later, Nordenskiold commented that in thirteenth-century pottery designs "the motifs of the first patterns executed in colours must be sought among the productions of the textile industry, where the ornament is often the necessary result of a method of weaving or plaiting" (1990:86 [1893]). In the first half of this century, Morris commented that the ear- liest pottery designs of this area "were strongly influenced by the antecedent and more familiar art of basketry" (1927:197); and Brew (1946:247) observed that on eighth-century pottery, "many of the designs were identical with those found on the decorated baskets." Awareness of this relationship has continued to the present (Brody 1991:61; Carl- son 1982:208; Hays 1992:261-264; Hays-Gilpin 1995; Larralde 1977).

The fact that textile details have been noted in Mesa Verde region pottery designs spanning more than seven centuries suggests that a long-term, conceptual relationship between these media is a rea- sonable possibility. Mesa Verde region textiles were usually decorated through the use of dyed weaving elements in the construction process. As a result, textiles were much more highly structured by the mechanics of various weaving processes than pottery designs were by brush and paint. The weaving technologies known to Mesa Verde people lent themselves to geometric designs, but on a smooth, slipped, and polished pottery surface, any manner of designs could have been painted, including representational scenes, plants and flowers, etc. Since such designs were not typically painted, and both textile and pottery designs were geometric in nature, it is reason- able to propose that the centuries-long stylistic unity between these media derived from projection of the conceptual structure of textiles onto pottery surfaces. In other words, Mesa Verde region potters conceptualized these media as being equivalent and expressed this equivalence in their pottery designs. The evidence supporting this proposal will be adduced in the following pages.

Metaphor Analysis as Decipherment The method I have used in exploring the textile- metaphor hypothesis bears some resemblance to the procedure philologists have used in deciphering ancient scripts. Although the two endeavors are quite different in their details, they share the important property of not being grounded in the linear, deduc-

tive logic that many archaeologists have been trained to privilege (i.e., Hempel 1966). Nevertheless, the decipherment of ancient scripts does produce stable knowledge of the past, and I suggest that compara- bly secure knowledge of ancient metaphors can be obtained by modeling our efforts on methods of decipherment.

A brief digression on one recent decipherment will illustrate my point. Linear B, the script of the Mycenaean Greeks, was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris after he made three critical assumptions about the texts (for a full account of this decipherment, see Chadwick 1958). First, based on the number of distinct characters identified in the inscriptions, he proposed that characters of Linear B stood for pronounceable syllables in whatever language they represented. Second, a few Linear B characters were physically similar to certain characters in the classical Cypriot script, which had been deciphered from bilingual inscriptions many years earlier, and Ventris assumed that the phonetic values of these characters were similar in both scripts. Third, and most controversially, Ventris proposed that the words spelled out by Linear B characters were in an archaic form of the Greek language.

These assumptions could not be verified inde- pendently, but Ventris nevertheless interpreted Lin- ear B characters in accordance with these assumptions and found that when this was done, the inscriptions began to yield phrases in a plausible ver- sion of archaic Greek that also made sense in light of their contexts. Thus, the decipherment of Linear B did not occur through the analysis of widely accepted, theory-free observations. Ventris's assumptions actually determined what the data in Linear B inscriptions were; however, they did not determine whether the interpreted characters would behave consistently with extensions of his model. This kind of recursive reasoning is typical of decipherment (Hock and Joseph 1996:94; Pope 1999), and the application of this logic has produced stable knowledge of the past in the form of readable ancient scripts. So in decipherment, the way interpretations of characters are obtained is of no consequence; what does matter is whether these interpretations, when applied to a corpus of inscriptions, produce consistently plausible readings, and these can only emerge if the interpretations of the characters are basically correct (Chadwick 1958:91).

Similar logic and procedures have been used in



Table 1: Archaeological metaphor analysis as a form of decipherment.

Decipherment of Ancient Scripts Archaeological Metaphor Analysis

1. Develop model of the language and kind of script (apha- 1. Develop model of the metaphorical relationship expressed betic, syllabic, logographic, or combination) represented in in material culture, specifying hypothetical source domain the inscriptions and target medium

2. Propose values of specific characters based on model, 2. Propose analogous features in target medium, based on bilingual texts, and/or contextual information image-schematic correspondences between source domain

and target medium 3. Examine interpreted characters in inscriptions, using distribution, model, and contextual information to propose inter- 3. Examine distribution of analogous features on target- pretations of additional characters medium objects, and across time and space

4. Determine whether resultant readings are consistent with 4. Determine whether patterns in analogous feature data are general linguistic structure, the specific language proposed, consistent with general properties of metaphor, and with spe- and contextual information cific metaphor proposed

marshaling evidence for the textile metaphor in Mesa Verde pottery painting (Table 1). The proposed relationship between these media explicitly guided my search for features of Mesa Verde pottery designs that appeared to derive from textiles. The analogous features I identified in the pottery designs each exhibit numerous correspondences with textiles, but there is no way to prove, a priori, that they are indeed metaphorical expressions. Nevertheless, I collected data on the ways these features combine in pottery designs, and on the distribution of these features in time and space, and identified numerous patterns in the resultant data that are consistent with expectations deriving from general properties of metaphor and the specific metaphor proposed. Even though the classification used and data collected derive from the hypothesis under consideration, this model did not determine whether these data would behave in accordance with extensions of the model. Cognitive linguistic research indicates that behavioral expressions of metaphor are highly structured, so much so that the pottery-design data are unlikely to behave in accordance with this structure by chance. Therefore, I believe both the classification and the hypothesis are supported by the results.

Collecting Evidence for the Textile Metaphor

The first step in adducing evidence for the textile- metaphor hypothesis was to reconstruct the history of the proposed source domain. The primary decorated textile media known for the Mesa Verde region include coiled basketry, plaited basketry, non-loom weaving, and loom-woven cotton cloth. Coiled baskets were made by sewing successive circuits of a

continuous, outward-spiraling coil onto itself. Vari- ous plant fibers were used. Plaited baskets were made by first plaiting a square mat of yucca leaves, then forcing the mat through a circular hoop and fasten- ing the ends of the plaiting strips to it. Non-loom weavings utilized warps and wefts in creating narrow articles including belts, tump bands or carrying straps, aprons, and sashes. Non-loom articles were made of Apocynum sp. fiber, dog or human hair, yucca cordage, cotton, and various combinations of these. Finally, cotton cloth was woven on upright or backstrap looms using heddles that could pick sets of warps simultaneously. These were also warp-weft weaves and were made exclusively of cotton yarn.

Unfortunately, even in the arid Southwest, the archaeological record of these four industries is not as complete as one would like. Although textile collections from thirteenth-century cliff dwellings are extensive and well-studied, comparable collections from eleventh- and twelfth-century contexts are quite rare. However, ancient Puebloan textile industries appear to have developed fairly consistently throughout the greater San Juan river drainage (Kent 1983a:124-125), of which the Mesa Verde region encompasses only the northern part, so the compro- mise chosen was to first inventory all significant textile media and decorative techniques in Mesa Verde region collections, and then to look beyond the Mesa Verde region itself, in particular to Chaco Canyon (Dutton 1938; Judd 1954; Pepper 1996), Chinle Wash (Adovasio and Gunn 1986; Magers 1986), and the Prayer Rock District (Morris 1980), for additional examples. When this larger area is considered, enough material is available for a historical recon-



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struction of these industries. A summary of this reconstruction is given in Table 2.

Next, I examined complete pottery vessels and published photographs, drawings, and descriptions of textiles in developing a list of pottery-design features that: a) occur in specific decorative zones of decorated serving bowls; b) appear to have analogues in specific weaving techniques; and c) are usually identifiable on sherds. The 25 analogous features I identified are comparable to conventional metaphorical expressions that would be compiled in studying figurative speech. These features are listed in Table 3 according to the source textile industry and decorative zone of a pottery bowl on which each occurs. The features are labeled using metaphorical expressions that specify the textile details that are argued to have been expressed in pottery designs. Most of these features are illustrated in this paper. Detailed descriptions of the analogous features, and an assess- ment of their date of invention in textiles, is given in an appendix available on the SAA website (www. saa. org/publications/amAntiq/AQAbstracts/ Aq65-4/appendix).

Each analogous feature was defined on the basis of correspondences between painted decoration on a specific decorative zone of a pottery bowl and the image-schematic structure of a particular kind of textile. These correspondences are enumerated in tab- ular form in the appendix. To illustrate what these analogous features are argued to represent, Figure 2 presents an interpretation of a relatively simple mapping, Feature 16. Figure 3 illustrates the source of Feature 16, and an example of its expression in pottery. In Figure 2, formal and interactional properties (interior, rim, exterior, contain objects, etc.) shared by plaited baskets and pottery bowls are linked via the generic space containers, and this linkage enables the transfer of additional conceptual structure, the correspondences themselves, from the mental imagery of a plaited basket onto a pottery-bowl surface. However, notice that some aspects of plaited basketry are not transferred, presumably because such a transfer would violate the invariance principle. For example, pottery designs were added to the surface of a completed and dried vessel and were painted by subdividing the field into smaller areas and then filling them in (Rohn 1977:163-164; Shep- ard 1963:296). Plaited basket designs, in contrast, were built up line by line, as plaiting strips were added to the growing mat. Designs were not woven

into textiles the way they were painted on pottery, so the method of weaving designs was not transferred to the sequence used in painting them.

To examine the development and use of analogous features in pottery designs across time and space, collections of bowl-rim sherds from trash deposits have been analyzed. Most of these are associated with tree- ring dated structures, so the assemblages could be dated independent of the ceramic data. Table 4 lists the analyzed assemblages, along with their latest associated tree-ring date, the chronological phase to which each is assigned, the number of rim sherds analyzed, and the number of sherds included in frequency cal- culations. Attribute data from more than 4,000 sherds from 29 different archaeological sites, totaling more than 100,000 separate observations, are included in this database. The sites are located within the Sand Canyon locality, the Ute Mountain piedmont, and McElmo Drainage areas of southwest Colorado, and in several areas of southeast Utah (Figure 1). In general, I have followed recent trends in the interpretation of tree-ring data, which see multiple clusters of dates as evidence of recycling rather than remodel- ing (Bradley 1993; Varien 1999:Chapters 5-6). Breaks between phases are based on the distribution of latest tree-ring dates from these sites.

The analysis focused on rim sherds because such sherds are more numerous and more consistently recovered than whole vessels, and they preserve evidence of the decoration applied to all four decorative zones of the original vessel (exterior, rim, interior margin, and interior). Also, the deposition of sherds seems to have been more unreflective than the plac- ing of certain vessels in burials, or the decision of ancient people to leave vessels inside abandoned structures (Lightfoot 1993; Schlanger and Wilshusen 1993). As a result, rim-sherd collections from mid- dens should provide more representative samples of the pottery used during an occupation than whole vessels. The primary disadvantage of sherds is that there is greater potential for misidentification of attributes that would be clear on a complete vessel. In order to minimize this kind of error, a three-value system (present, absent, indeterminate) was used in recording each analogous feature, and sherds from the same vessel were identified to provide a means of checking consistency. Very few examples of con- tradictory, determinate observations were found among the conjoining sets in the database, suggesting that inaccurate identifications were rare.



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Generic: Containers

Source: Plaited basketry Target Pottery bowl *contain objects contain objects -exterior : exterior

*rirn ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~rim *interior i nterlor *colored plaiting strips * solid lines *twill-plaiting counterchanged positive and

negative space *centered design centered, all-over design *square mat draped rectangular to circular layout over osier ring *painted *design line by line *design by outline and fill

Figure 2. Diagram of mapping represented by analogous feature 16. Properties of plaited baskets and pottery bowls that are common to the generic concept containers define the mapping, which enables the transfer of additional conceptual structure from plaited basketry to pottery surfaces. Note that elements of plaited basketry that do not correspond to pottery are not projected.

Extensions of the Textile Metaphor Hypothesis

The general propelties of metaphor reviewed earlier make predictions about the structure Mesa Verde pottery designs should have if they were indeed material expressions of a textile metaphor. Data collected under the guidance of the textile-metaphor hypoth-

esis exhibit numerous patterns that are consistent with these predictions. These patterns are discussed in this section according to the property to which each pattern relates.

The Superordinate Principle. The identified analogous features listed in Table 3 relate to four different textile media-coiled basketry, plaited basketry,

a b Figure 3. Colored, twill-plaited basket and analogous pottery design illustrating feature 16, colored twill-plaited design. a) basket from Mesa Verde, after Morris & Burgh 1941:Figure 36b, C) Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; b) pottery from Alkali Ridge, Utah, after Brew 1946:Figure 71b.



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\C ? ? Xnon-loom fabrics, and loom-woven cotton cloth. These are basic-level categories, because a concrete image of a typical example of each kind of weaving

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X u u u u 0 o 000 i g mappings with pottery. Thus, the general mapping appears to have been from the superordinate category textiles to pottery, but specific material expressions of the mapping are at the basic level, consistent with expectations of the superordinate principle.

The Directionality Constraint. Two patterns support the notion that the relationship between textiles and pottery was asymmetrical; that is, that concep-

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spondences that map incidental details imparted by H F CQ ,,, 3 0 < > 0 X X o i different weaving processes. For example, when a

>D -14 , triangle is sewn into a coiled basket wall, a leg that 4 v Xm is diagonal to the rim and travels against the work

m zmv Z O m 4 z; m W m t direction will necessarily appear jagged due to its t travelling in opposition to the stitch-slant (Figure

= 4a); but when a triangle is executed in twill-tapestry weave on a loom-woven fabric, it is a vertical leg

E 0 0 0 04 04 u ;. ;,, X r Table 5. Summary of Correspondences.

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Number 4Z4 Type of Correspondence Exhibited

(a) Use of colored weaving elements 17 > . < =3(b) Colored motifs 8

. = t ^ (c) Design structure and layout 59 X ar m (d) Incidental details of weaving processes 11

o oo oo oo oo r- ~ ~ (e) Surface textures 14 Z ;;

E_ E< F E E EH= ?? ??- ?Total correspondences listed in appendix 109 X , co co co co co co co



a b

c d

e Figure 4. Coiled basketry and twill-tapestry cotton cloth triangles, and ticked triangles on pottery. a) basket from Canyon del Muerto, after Morris & Burgh 1941:Figure 41q, C Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; b) design on cloth from Mesa Verde, after Kent 1983a:Figure 8.12 (also illustrated in figure 12a); c) pottery design from the Cowboy Wash Area (Collection 19), triangles illustrate feature 12, coiled/non-loom triangle; line at top is on the rim, illustrating feature 1, colored rim coil; true background in band illustrates feature 10, coiled color design; d) pottery band design from Badger House, Mesa Verde, overall design illustrates feature 18, pre-cotton non-loom band design, after Hayes and Lancaster 1975:Figure 126; triangles illustrate feature 12, coiled/non-loom triangle, C Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; e) pottery band design from the La Plata District, triangles illustrate feature 25, twill-tapestry triangle; overall design illustrates feature 22, twill-tapestry band design, after Morris 1939:Figure 67.118.

(parallel to the warps on an upright loom) that will appear jagged, due to the twill-rhythm (Figure 4b). These subtle differences in triangles woven in various media were actually expressed in pottery designs as ticked triangles, with the ticking on the appropriate leg (Features 13 and 25; Figure 4c-e). Notice that these details were not intentionally woven into triangles in different textile media but were unavoid- able consequences of different weaving processes.

In addition, category (e) includes correspondences that represent textile-surface textures rendered in paint

on a pottery surface. As examples, Features 5 and 7 use thin-framing lines, which run around the vessel circumference with wider unpainted spaces between, to represent the dark interstices between coils in a coiled basket wall (Figure 5); Feature 15 uses broad "hatchure-filled lines" to represent the relationship between individual strips of yucca and the overall interval-shift pattern in twill-plaited ring-basket designs (Figure 6); and Feature 21 uses background hatchure, which fills unpainted areas of centered, all- over designs, to represent the twill-ribs of a twilled



Figure 5. Coiled basketry wall and analogous pottery framing pattern illustrating features 5-8, coil interstices, alternating colored and uncolored coils, colored coils and interstices, and stitch-marks. a) basket from Horse Rock Ruin, SE Utah (Adovasio & Andrews 1990, Type III, Container 2), ? Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; b) pottery from Long House, Mesa Verde, after Cattanach 1980:Figure 132b.1, C) Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

cotton fabric (Figure 7). That incidental details and surface textures were also mapped onto pottery designs argues strongly that the direction of mappings was from textiles to pottery. It is very difficult to conceive of weavers inventing new weaving techniques in order to translate existing details of painted pottery designs into new surface textures or incidental details of motifs on textiles.

Figure 6. Plain twill-plaited basket and analogous pottery design illustrating feature 15, uncolored twill-plaited design. a) basket from Mesa Verde, after Nordenskiold 1990:Plate XLV.2 [1893], C) Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; b) pottery from Shiprock, New Mexico, after Lister & Lister 1978:Figure 19, C) Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

The second pattern supporting the directionality constraint is that none of the 25 analogous features in pottery designs was invented prior to being attested in the textile industry each is argued to derive from. Table 6 presents frequencies (percentages) of the 25 analogous features for sherd collections dating to eight chronological phases of the Great Pueblo Period.4 Certain cells of the table have been shaded to indicate phases in which the source of each analogous feature is attested in the textile record (see Appendix and Table 1). This table shows that, although there are a few features (especially 2, 23 and 24) that appear to have existed for some time in textiles prior to being transferred to pottery, none of



i t/

a

Figure 7. Twill-tapestry cotton fabric and analogous pottery design illustrating feature 21, twill-rib background. a) cloth from Grand Gulch, after Kent 1957:Figure 97a; b) pottery from the La Plata District, after Morris 1939:Plate 318a, C Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

the analogous features appears in more than trace amounts during phases for which the textile coun- terparts of these features are unattested. If we allow for a few misclassifications and intrusive sherds, it becomes very likely that none of these features was expressed in pottery designs prior to being invented in the relevant textile medium. Also, in almost every case, the frequencies of analogous features increase in the phases that follow this initial transfer. These data support the notion that, due to the greater inherent structure of textile design, textiles represented the

Figure 8. Example of "non-grammatical" continuation of an interior design derived from cotton cloth onto a pottery bowl rim, C Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

source domain and pottery the target domain of the metaphor.

The Invariance Principle. This principle is supported by the fact that, for features derived from coiled basketry, rims are mapped onto rims, walls onto walls, and interiors onto interiors. Only two of the more than 4,000 analyzed sherds exhibit rim decorations that continue an interior design derived from woven cotton fabrics onto the rim surface (Figure 8). These isolated cases do violate the invariance principle, because the edges of woven textiles do not correspond to the rim of a pottery bowl, but they are exceedingly rare (we will see later how the mapping of warp-weft weaves onto pottery interiors was accomplished).

Also, despite the fact that some rim decoration elements, such as ticks and dashes, were also painted in framing spaces, there is not a single example of X's and zig-zags being used in this way. Why should some elements of rim decoration be used in framing patterns and not others? This apparently mysterious restriction makes perfect sense in light of the invariance principle. Ticks and dashes could be painted between framing lines as well as on rims because both were made in coiled basketry by wrapping colored stitching material around the coil as it was sewn onto the growing basket. If the colored stitching material was inserted on the final coil, it formed a rim tick; if it was inserted farther down the vessel wall, it became a tick mark on a coil. In contrast, the false-braiding technique, from which X and zig-zag rim decorations are argued to derive, could only be applied to the rim of a coiled basket and could not be done in the basket wall. Thus, it would have vio-



Table 6. Analogous Features in Mesa Verde Pottery Designs, A.D. 1060-1280.

Phase (years A.D.) Source Industry of Feature 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Zone where feature occurs 1060- 1090- 1110- 1140- 1180- 1230- 1250- 1260- Analogous feature 1090 1110 1140 1180 1230 1250 1260 1280

Coiled Basketry Rims (1) Colored rim coil 42.3 27.9 19.4 6.0 2.9 2.2 1.8 0.1 (2) Rim stitching 0.0 6.0 10.5 32.0 46.5 44.0 48.2 42.3 (3) Rim stitch gaps 0.0 0.0 0.0 2.0 10.3 8.2 11.7 8.2 (4) False-braided rim 0.0 0.0 0.0 3.3 4.2 3.8 5.1 8.0 Interior vessel walls/margins (5) Coil interstices 3.9 1.1 0.0 10.3 3.7 6.0 5.1 6.1 (6) Alternating colored & uncolored coils 0.0 0.0 0.4 9.5 13.0 3.6 10.2 7.0 (7) Colored coils and interstices 0.0 0.5 1.1 17.2 21.5 38.1 30.8 34.2 (8) Stitch-marks 0.0 0.5 0.4 4.8 5.4 2.0 6.5 4.2 Interior designs (9) Coiled color designs 26.2 14.2 14.0 18.6 9.1 7.2 9.5 5.5 (10) Coiled texture designs 2.0 0.6 0.4 18.6 6.3 7.1 12.6 9.0 (11) Coiled terrace 3.8 1.0 0.0 1.4 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.4 (12) Coiled/non-loom triangle 0.0 1.9 2.5 0.0 0.0 0.8 1.4 1.1 Exterior designs (13) Coiled surface texture 6.8 1.8 3.6 1.6 0.4 0.6 0.8 0.3

Plaited Basketry Interior designs (14) Simple plaited designs 5.1 7.3 13.8 2.1 3.8 0.5 3.7 2.1 (15) Uncolored twill-plaited designs 35.9 27.6 25.6 11.6 1.5 5.3 1.5 1.1 (16) Colored twill-plaited designs 10.3 16.3 28.6 10.5 10.5 14.5 5.9 8.6 Exterior designs (17) Exterior selvage band designs 0.0 0.0 0.0 2.3 2.0 6.5 9.7 11.1

Non-loom Warp-Weft Weaves Interior Designs (18) Pre-cotton non-loom band designs 15.4 16.3 4.9 4.2 0.8 1.0 0.7 1.4 (19) Post-cotton non-loom band designs 0.0 2.4 1.0 4.2 8.3 8.7 5.9 5.8 (20) Plain-tapestry terrace 3.1 4.1 0.6 6.0 12.4 11.5 12.7 14.2

Loom-woven Cotton Cloth Interior designs (21) Twill-rib background 0.0 2.4 3.0 8.4 18.0 16.4 12.6 18.1 (22) Twill-tapestry band designs 0.0 0.0 0.5 6.3 22.6 21.7 27.4 26.5 (23) All-over twill-tapestry designs 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 2.3 4.8 2.2 2.8 (24) Twill-tapestry terTace 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 5.3 1.6 4.1 7.7 (25) Twill-tapestry triangle 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.8 4.0 4.0 2.7 3.3

Non-textile Designs (26) Non-basketry rim decorations 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.4 0.9 0.0 0.7 (27) Non-basketry framing patterns 1.8 0.0 0.0 1.9 2.3 1.5 1.8 2.1 (28) Mixed weave & non-textile 2.4 9.0 6.5 4.9 2.6 4.9 0.7 4.3

interior designs

Number of local painted vessels examined 59 220 334 187 266 364 259 1671 Note: Numbers are percents. Shaded cells indicate presence of feature in textile record.



a

c

Figure 9. Coiled basket compared with "grammatical" and "non-grammatical" framing patterns in pottery. a) basket from Long House, Mesa Verde, after Cattanach 1980:Figure 420, ? Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; b) "grammatical" pottery rim sherd from Sand Canyon Pueblo, rim illustrates feature 4, false-braided rim; framing pattern illustrates feature 7, colored coils and interstices, and feature 8, stitch-marks, ? Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; c) unattested, "non-grammatical" pottery rim sherd due to placement of feature 4 in framing spaces, ? Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

lated the invariance principle to map a false-braided rim coil onto framing spaces (Figure 9).

The Constitutive Principle. The primary pattern supporting the notion that pottery designs were literally conceptualized as textile fabrics is that pottery designs unrelated to known weaving processes, or that combine weaving processes in impossible ways, never constitute more than a small percentage of the total corpus of designs in the analyzed assemblages.

This pattern holds for rim decorations, framing patterns, and interior designs (Table 6). These data indicate that "non-textile" designs did not become more popular over time. Howevei; the fact that some do consistently occur is important. It shows that artists did occasionally imagine designs that were poor applications of the metaphor, or were simply unrelated to it, but that such designs seem to have been evaluated negatively by other potters, and were not often emulated. The textile metaphor therefore appears to have placed limitations on the invention and evaluation of new pottery designs.

Blended Sources. Features 18 through 25 are argued to derive from warp-weft weaves, woven either with or without a loom (Table 3). It is straightforward to imagine how details of coiled and plaited basketry might be mapped onto pottery-vessel surfaces, but how would this be accomplished for warp- weft weaves, which generally do not have basket or pottery shapes? The answer is conceptual blending. It can be shown that warp-weft weaves were mapped onto pottery-vessel surfaces by first being blended with either coiled or plaited basketry, and that entailments of these blendings were carried over into pottery designs.

Non-loom warp-weft weaves, such as belts, aprons, sashes, and tump bands, were long, narrow, and flexible, with the warp axis following the long dimension. The design on such articles naturally traveled along the longer warp axis. In use, these objects were often formed into bands that wrapped around the waist or head. By conceptually mapping the warps of these bands onto the coils of a coiled basket, band designs on narrow, non-loom articles could be blended into the interior of a coiled basket, and this blended image subsequently transferred to pottery (Figure 10).

Figure 11 illustrates this mapping, which shows that points of correspondence between non-loom aprons and coiled baskets, and additional conceptual structure unique to each medium-such as the plain tapestry weaving method and the rim finishing technique of coiled baskets-were projected onto a new, blended source domain for transfer to pottery. In this case, coiled-basket wall surface texture and a plain tapestry-weave band design were mapped onto the same pottery-vessel interior. This blended source is impossible on a single woven object, but it is conceptually coherent in terms of mental imagery and its manipulation.



MffP

~M

P

Figure 10. Non-loom apron, coiled basket, and analogous "blended" pottery design. a) apron from northern Arizona, after E. B. Sayles photo in Kent 1983b:Figure 42, C Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; b) coiled basket from Long House, Mesa Verde, after Cattanach 1980:Figure 420, C Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; c) vessel from Sand Canyon Pueblo, after Lee Schmidlap drawing, rim illustrates feature 4, false-braided rim; framing pattern illustrates feature 7, colored coils and interstices; motif illustrates feature 20, plain-tapestry terrace; band design illustrates feature 19, post-cotton non- loom band design; C Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

The introduction of cotton and heddle technology aroundA.D. 1100 dramatically increased the creative resources of potters for innovative mappings. Wide fabrics, in which the weft axis was not significantly shorter than the warp axis, began to be woven on looms, and new weaving techniques were developed that enabled new motifs, design structures, and surface textures to be created. How were these new ideas transferred to pottery? Band designs were woven into cotton cloth, but unlike narrow non-loom

articles, the band in cotton cloth traveled along the weft axis, perpendicular to the warps. So to map a band woven in twill-tapestry on cotton cloth (Fea- ture 22) onto pottery, the fabric would need to be conceptually "rolled" into a tube, and the wefts mapped onto the coils of a coiled basket. An example of a twill-tapestry band design in cotton cloth and in pottery is shown in Figure 12. This example shows how a band design woven in twill-tapestry on cotton cloth and a coiled basket surface texture could be transferred onto the same pottery-vessel interior.

Centered, all-over designs were also woven into cotton cloth, and it appears that such designs were mapped onto pottery through the conduit of plaited basketry (Figure 13). In plaited basketry, a square mat was woven first, and then it was forced down through, and fastened onto, a circular hoop. By mapping the warp and weft of a quadrilateral cotton cloth onto the plaiting strips of this mat, the cotton fabric could be substituted for the plaited mat and thus mapped onto pottery to create a centered, all-over design derived from cotton cloth. Figure 14 illustrates this kind of mapping, and again shows how correspondences between loom-woven cotton cloth and plaited basketry, as well as conceptual structure unique to each medium, were blended to create a physically impossible but conceptually coherent source for mapping onto a pottery-bowl interior.

The examples described here represent just a few of the more common and straightforward blendings that Mesa Verde potters set up in imagining pottery designs. By considering entailments of the two blending processes discussed here, "banding" via coiled basketry (see Figures 5, 10, 12) and "draping" via plaited basketry (see Figures 3, 6, 7, 13), we can adduce evidence that these blendings really occurred in the minds of Mesa Verde potters. Framing patterns that frame-band designs are argued to derive from coiled-basketry surfaces, and in this framework are conceptually coherent in mappings of non-loom articles and weft-axis loom-woven band designs in cotton cloth onto pottery. In contrast, framing patterns would be incoherent in mappings of plaited basketry and centered cotton cloth designs onto pottery, because coiled-basket surface textures cannot be created in plaited basketry. So, according to this model, combining framing patterns and draped, all-over design layouts on pottery would violate the invariance principle.

Table 7 cross-tabulates the occurrence of complex



Generic: Textiles *vegetal *woven

,,,,,,..... *fabric ___________ _____ _ A ,*container

Source,: Non-loom apron Source2: Coiled basketry *design line by line * design line by line *weft * stitching *warp B foundation/coils *ends can connect coils form bands *dyed weft e 'dyed stitching material

*plain tapestry 0 Blend Source3 colored coils

\B dSou*irn byout

-plain~~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ treglarsymetr en ~~~~~~~~ zi-aeo i

*pa intedsiil etr

baddesignbyotieadfl

Figure 11. Diagram of mapping represented by pottery vessel in Figure 10. Points of correspondence in the generic space are not duplicated in the two source domains for the sake of brevity, and a second generic space (containers) gov- erning the mapping of the blended source onto pottery (as in Figure 3) is left out for the sake of clarity. Non-loom fabrics and coiled basketry are related via the generic space textiles. Points of correspondence between non-loom fabrics and coiled basketry are projected, along with additional conceptual structure unique to each medium, onto a blended space, which serves as the source domain for metaphorical projection onto pottery. Note that elements of the blended spaceof at do not correspond to pottery are not projected.

framing patterns with "banded" and "draped" design layouts for sherds dating after A.D. 1 140, when complex framing patterns were most common. 5The table shows that, indeed, complex framing patterns are rarely combined with draped design layouts in the analyzed collections. A few examples of complex framing and draped layouts do occur, but these are no more prevalent than the non-textile and mixed- weave interior designs in Table 6, suggesting that such combinations were selected against by potters and never became popular. There is no physical reason why complex framing patterns and all-over designs should not have been combined in pottery designs. On average, framing patterns only take up the top two centimeters of the interior design field, leaving plenty of room for all-over designs to be created over the rest of the vessel surface. Yet, this combination did not normally occur, and the reason for

this remains totally obscure until it is considered in light of blended sources.

The Experiential Principle. This final property is supported by two patterns. First, it is apparent that Mea Verde potters were not strongly influenced by designs on imported vessels, because demonstrably nonlocal sherds are quite rare in Great Pueblo Period Mesa Verde sites and decrease in frequency over time (Lipe 1995:158; Ortman 2000). If there were evidence of significant cultural influence from outside the region, it would raise the possibility that Mesa Verde potters adopted pottery designs invented elsewhere simply because the donor culture was per- ceived as prestigious. If this were the case, Mesa Verde potters could have emulated designs that derived from a textile metaphor in some other Puebloan culture, but might not have possessed the metaphor themselves. But since Mesa Verde potters



__

Figure 12. Twill-tapestry cotton cloth, coiled basket, and analogous "blended" pottery design. a) cloth from Mesa Verde, after Nordenskiold 1990:Plate L [1893], ?) Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; b) basket from Mesa Verde, after Morris & Burgh 1941:Figure 27j, 18b, ?) Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; c) vessel from Sand Canyon Pueblo, after Lee Schmidlap drawing, rim illustrates feature 2, rim-stitching, and feature 3, rim stitch gaps; motif illustrates feature 25, twill-tapestry triangle; and band illustrates feature 22, twill-tapestry band design, ?) Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

do not appear to have experienced imported vessels very often, this possibility seems unlikely.

Second, intra-regional spatial patterns suggest that the exposure of potters to different textile industries influenced their creativity. Pottery collections dating to the A.D. 1250-1280 period have been analyzed from 11 different localities within the Mesa Verde region (locations given in Figure 1). Analo- gous feature frequencies were calculated for these 11 localities, using the same procedures discussed for Table 6 (see Note 4). Since sample sizes were small for several of the localities, these raw proportions were adjusted for random-sampling error using empirical Bayesian methods outlined in Robertson (1999). This procedure modified observed analogous feature proportions in light of the samples from which they were calculated, the global distribution of proportions for each analogous feature across the eleven localities, and the local distributions of analogous feature proportions in adjacent localities.6 Pos- terior Bayesian estimates of proportions for the five loom-woven cotton cloth features, and six coiled

basketry features that reached their peak popularity during the mid-thirteenth century, were then analyzed by principal components analysis (PCA).

Loadings for the 11 analogous features on the first principal component are given in ascending order in Table 8. The first principal component represents the dominant pattern of variation in analogous feature proportions from the 11 localities. These loadings show that analogous features deriving from loom-woven cotton cloth tend to have a positive score, while features deriving from coiled basketry tend to load negatively. Figure 15 is a thematic map that labels the 11 localities according to their score on the first principal component. This map clearly illustrates an East-West gradient in pottery designs that emphasizes coiled basketry features in the east (negative scores), and loom-woven cotton cloth features in the west (positive scores). This pattern is also apparent in distribution maps of individual analogous-feature proportions, and in PCAs of the raw frequency data that are not presented here. However, the multivariate analysis of Bayesian estimates pro-



a c

b d Figure 13. Twill-tapestry cotton cloth, plaited basket, and analogous "blended" pottery design. a) cloth from Grand Gulch, after Kent 1983b:Plate 10, (C Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; b) basket from Mesa Verde, after Morris & Burgh 1941:Figure 37a, (? Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; c) pottery bowl from Long House, Mesa Verde, after Cattanach 1980:Figure 163g, interior illustrates feature 23, all-over twill-tapestry design, ? Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; d) pottery bowl from Mug House, Mesa Verde, after Rohn 1971:Figure 173e, exterior illustrates feature 17, exterior selvage band design, ? Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

vides the clearest and most concise representation of trends in the existing data.

Based on the principle that culture traits tend to be diffuse outward from their places of origin (Sapir 1949:410-420 [1916]), this analysis suggests that analogous features derived from coiled basketry tended to originate in Colorado, and those deriving from loom-woven cotton cloth tended to be invented in Utah. Direct evidence of cotton cultivation and weaving, including cotton seeds, loom anchors, cotton thread and weaving tools, is also much more common in southeast Utah, in both cliff-dwellings and open-air sites (Lindsay and Dykman 1978; Lipe 1960; Lipe et al. 1960; Thompson et al. 1988; Walker 1977). In contrast, comparable evidence does not occur in any of the Sand Canyon Locality or McElmo Drainage sites in the pottery database. Even in cliff dwellings on Mesa Verde proper, the evidence sug-

gests that cotton was not cultivated locally (Brown 1975; Rohn 1971). However, the raw materials for basket making can be found everywhere, and bone awls suitable for use in basket weaving, fragments of coiled basketry, and basket-impressed sherds are often found in sites throughout the region. Thus, potters everywhere were well acquainted with coiled basketry.

These data suggest that potters in the western Mesa Verde region had more direct experience with cotton weaving on looms, and focused on this experience in conceptualizing new pottery designs. In contrast, potters in the eastern area had less exposure to cotton weaving, leading to a creative focus on coiled basketry. This correspondence between local emphases in textile industries and derivative pottely designs suggests that potters in different areas drew upon textile industries they knew well in imag-



Generic: Textiles *vegetal *woven * *fabric

_____ ____ ____ ____ --

*container A Source: Cotton Cloth Source2: Plaited basketry *design line by line ~ - 'design line by line *warp & weft * xplaiting strips *twill-tapestry * - - 'twill-plaiting

*rectangular cloth x -. isquare plaited mat -rectangular cloth1~ *dyed wefit - .dyed plaiting strips

*twilt-ribs 0 Blend Source3 *~~~~~~~~mat draped over osier ring -twill-ribs *- Blnd, Soure -selvages attached to ring

0 exterior selvage band

Target: Pottery bowl regular geometry radiating, all-over design solid motifs background hatchure geometric center, circular

periphery no framing pattern

\ ticked rim exterior band design *painted *design by outline and fill

Figure 14. Diagram of mapping represented by pottery vessels in Figure 13. Points of correspondence in the generic space are not duplicated in the two source domains for the sake of brevity, and a second generic space (containers) gov- erning the mapping of the blended source onto pottery (as in Figure 3) is left out for simplicity. Cotton cloth and plaited basketry are related via the generic space textiles. Points of correspondence between cotton cloth and plaited basketry are projected, along with additional conceptual structure unique to each medium, onto a blended space, which serves as the source domain for metaphorical projection onto pottery. Note that elements of the blended space that do not correspond to pottery are not projected.

ining pottery designs, consistent with the experiential principle.

Why the Textile Metaphor? The data presented in the case study raise the following question: what is the probability of the analogous-feature data behaving in accordance with all these general properties of metaphor, and with entailments of the textile metaphor specifically, purely by chance? Even if it cannot be proved deductively, there is varied and abundant evidence that supports the existence of a textile metaphor in Mesa Verde pottery painting, and I believe this evidence is too detailed to have arisen by chance, or by wishful thinking on my part. Many of the patterns reported in this study were completely unanticipated and were not even considered as expectations when I began collecting data on Mesa Verde pottery designs. Never- theless, the analogous feature data do behave in

accordance with numerous extensions of the textile- metaphor hypothesis, and patterns in the resultant data support the assumptions used in defining these analogous features. I therefore believe that POTTERY IS A TEXTILE describes an ancient mental phenomenon that really was shared among Mesa Verde potters and that is decipherable from archaeological remains alone, without the benefit of native consul- tants.

What the case study does not address is why Mesa Verde potters should have conceptualized pottery designs as textile surfaces. This topic deserves much more attention than can be given to it here, but for now it should be sufficient to say that pottery and textiles appear to have been used as source domains for additional metaphors in Mesa Verde culture. Thus, stylistic unity between pottery and textiles may have been but one expression of a more complex worldview grounded in the imagery of containers.



Table 7. Interior Design Layout vs. Multiple-Line Framing Patterns.

Complex Banded Draped Framing Pattern Layout Layout Total

Absent 372 518 890 (47%) (92.5%)

Present 414 42 456 (53%) (7.5%)

Total 786 560 1346 (100%) (100%)

The form and decoration of the Mesa Verde kiva is a salient example. Although they appear to have been components of residential architecture (Cater and Chenault 1988; Lipe 1989; Ortman 1998; Varien 1999), Mesa Verde kivas followed rigid architectural conventions and contained numerous features of symbolic or ritual importance. The typical kiva was circular and subterranean, was entered through the roof, and contained a small circular hole or sipapu that represents the "earth navel" or emergence place in all modem Pueblo cultures. In addition, the walls of Mesa Verde kivas were occasionally decorated in ways that correspond with the decoration of pottery bowls (Martin 1936; Morris 1991). Even framing patterns were occasionally painted on the pilasters or roof supports of kivas (e.g., Morris 1991:Figure 5.24). Finally, the roofs of Mesa Verde kivas were constructed of concentric circuits of timbers, which formed a hemispherical vegetal surface that is per- ceptually similar to a coiled basket.

This combination of a "coiled basket" roof with "pottery bowl" walls in the kiva suggests that textiles and pottery were linked in additional metaphorical concepts that defined the Mesa Verde Puebloan world. Houses and religious structures often incor-

porate cosmological metaphors into their form and decoration (Parker Pearson and Richards 1994), and in certain modem Pueblo cultures the kiva is considered an expression of a cosmos comprised of an earth-bowl below and an overturned sky-basket above (Brody and Swentzell 1996; Swentzell 1990). This conceptualization maps very well onto the form and decoration of Mesa Verde kivas (Figure 16) and may be evidence for continuity in worldview between Mesa Verde Puebloans and certain modem groups (Ortman 1999). If indeed the Mesa Verde kiva was a metaphorical expression of an earth-bowl and sky-basket cosmos, one possible explanation for the textile metaphor in Mesa Verde pottery painting would be that pottery and textiles were considered to be complementary part

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