Archaeology without Borders: Contact, Commerce, and Change in the U.S. Southwest and Northwestern Mexico

13. Life's Pathways: Geographic Metaphors in Ancestral Puebloan Material Culture

Recognizing the cultural importance of metaphors helps archaeologists and art historians understand how shared ideas facilitate interaction among social groups, past and present. Metaphors describe one thing in terms of another. We usually think of metaphors as verbal expression, but visual metaphors are just as frequent and important and are sometimes amenable to archaeological analysis. Particular expressions and contexts of metaphors should help us trace migration, pilgrimage, and the spread of religious systems across time and space. Metaphors may also provide evidence for transformations and innovations in ritual practice, iconography, and graphic expression in particular times and places. To study metaphors in the archaeological record, the first task is to recognize material expression of important metaphors and symbols. Ethnography provides the best evidence, but in the absence of texts, one can investigate “natural symbols” and proposed universal metaphors, at least as hypotheses. The second and more difficult task is to find distinctive contexts, combinations, and expressions of such concepts. Third, we must discover how these expressions are patterned in time and space. I would like to suggest two geographic metaphors that are differentially patterned in the Puebloan region: the Pueblo banding line, with a “line break” or Kelley Hays-Gilpin Life’s Pathways Geographic Metaphors in Ancestral Puebloan Material Culture 13 257 Kelley Hays-Gilpin 258 “breath gate” in pottery and baskets as a metaphor for women’s lives, and the concept of roads converging on center places as metaphors for social organization and community histories. In addition, Scott Ortman (2003, Chapter 12, this volume) has described a Tewa-centered basket-bowl pair as a sky-earth cosmogram. I have not found this metaphor expressed at Hopi in general, but individual Hopi clan traditions and the traditional histories of other Pueblos should be explored to see if this concept is expressed and if it useful for tracing clan histories. For example, if sky and earth are described as a basket and bowl in some clan histories, songs, or rituals, this might suggest origins for those clans that are shared or derived from Tewa groups. Some metaphorical expressions may be differentially expressed in Pueblo languages and cultures because of the individual histories of different peoples who came together over the last few thousand years to become a heterodox composite of clans, sodalities, dual divisions, villages, and language groups. Some commonly recurring metaphors probably reflect an ancient substrate of belief still held in common throughout Greater Mesoamerica. Still others may indicate ancient, common origins in pan-American and Asian shamanistic traditions, ideas about landscape and cosmology that arise from shared experiences in the natural world (natural metaphors) and the neuropsychological structures and processes shared by all anatomically modern humans. THE LINE BREAK Kenneth Chapman and Bruce Ellis surveyed line break features in a 1951 article entitled “The Line-Break, Problem Child of Pueblo Pottery.” The line break appears earliest in seventh-century (possibly earlier) basketry in the Canyon de Chelly area (Figure 13.1). It next appears in Chaco Canyon on a small number of pottery vessels and is widespread in the Pueblo world by a.d. 1300 (Figure 13.2). This feature has a particular distribution in time, space, and media. It has different contexts in different Pueblo communities, past and present. Particular ethnographic meanings of the line break suggest it has something to do with emergence and migration, birth, women’s reproduction, and craft production. Chapman and Ellis recognized a pattern, posited that the pattern was meaningful, but drew few conclusions about what that meaning might be. More than fifty years later, the line break has been considered something of an unsolved mystery, to which I propose a partial solution: the Pueblo line break on basketry and pottery vessels connects two important metaphors into one context when expressed as bodies are vessels and life is a journey. Bodies are vessels may be a universal metaphor, based on shared physical experience of bodies as containers for food, water, babies, and more abstract concepts such as soul, spirit, or life force. This metaphor is often expressed in the reverse as vessels are bodies. Effigy vessels and the application of features that represent breasts to pottery vessels can express this metaphor visually by making vessels into bodies (see David, Sterner, and Gavua 1988 for an African example). Naming vessel Figure 13.1a and b. Four unfinished burden baskets with deliberate breaks in the banding line, Canyon del Muerto. American Museum of...