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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

 

 

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]

Lately I have been thinking a lot about ‘material’ – the stuff that things are made of. For a little while now I have been mulling over two related concepts which I have coined 'Intramateriality' and 'Intermateriality' (inspired and adapted from the literary/linguistic concept of intertextuality).  'Intramateriality' refers to objects within that same category of material (or medium).  'Intermateriality' refers to objects across, or between materials (or media).  While going through the readings on Neolithic figurines last week, I kept thinking about these concepts and about notions of ‘materiality’ in a much more literal way than Hodder (who seems to have been using 'materiality' rather more abstractly in his article).  I started thinking about the stuff that these figurines are actually made of – in art historical terms, their medium/-a – and this started leading to a number of interesting questions which were not really touched upon by any of the articles that we read this week.  I will try to articulate some of these thoughts, and hopefully I will illustrate what I mean by 'intermateriality' and 'intramateriality'.

Most of the extant figurines are made of clay.  A few are made of stone.  The human world in which these figurines were produced largely consisted of clay/earth and stone.  What then is the relationship between these figurines (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, etc.) and other objects made of the same stuff (i.e. which share the same medium/-a).  Is it significant that the clay figurines are made of the same material as the vast majority of contemporaneous cooking/storage containers, building materials, and other objects which surrounded them and the people who made them?  What can be said about the ‘intramateriality’ of these objects - that is, the relationships between objects which are made of the same material (i.e. which share the same medium/-a)? 

In thinking about the intramateriality of objects, connections and groupings immediately emerge between objects which are almost always classified and studied separately: stone tools/weapons, stone figurines, stone beads, stone columns/reliefs, rock art all share the same medium (or different versions of one larger ‘medium’ category – stone).  What does it mean for someone to have used a stone tool to carve a figurine/column/bead/rock relief/other stone tool out of stone?  What is the significance of molding a figurine out of the same stuff which covers the floor of your home, of which cooking pots, storage containers, and other objects around you are made, and which is fired in the same way (thus gaining all of the same physical properties shared by all fired ceramics)?  Such an approach is necessarily contextual – one can no longer think of ‘figurines’ as a category which is hermeneutically extricable from all the other objects (and features – such as floors, or mudbrick walls, for example) which share the same medium/material within the context of the creation, use, and deposition of such figurines.

Our traditional archaeological categories are completely transformed with such an approach, as groups of objects are re-arranged into completely different categories of analysis: all stone objects viewed together, all clay objects viewed together.  One could extend this to other categories of material – such as bone, for example.  Unfortunately, due to post-depositional processes and differential preservation, for the most part we are left guessing about other media which presumably were just as present and important as stone and clay (if not more so) within the lives of these people – including wood, textiles/fabrics, leather/hides, etc.  We can only speculate about the intramateriality (within the same material category) and intermateriality (across material boundaries) of these materials/media and the objects which were fashioned from them. 

On one level this approach asks for the consideration of ‘medium specificity’ – what is significant about the fact that something is made out of one material and not another?  What are the specific (and perhaps unique) properties of that medium?  Is it significant that most of the extant figurines are made of clay, thereby sharing the physical properties of other clay objects (the most conspicuous of which is pottery)? What about their deliberate burial under the earth (either under actual house floors, or simply in a pit somewhere) – where they are deliberately and actively immersed within the substance out of which they were made (earth/clay)?  One could then begin exploring object categories which cross material boundaries: for example – similar figurines made out of stone, clay, and bone.  Similar types of objects could begin to be comparatively analyzed across medium boundaries, leading to the discovery of different nuances of intermateriality.

Analytical categories are necessary for the study of anything.  But where the boundaries on such categories are placed is always rather arbitrary.  With every different arrangement or constructed category, different questions are possible and become apparent.  If we re-arrange our conceptions of traditional ‘object’ categories and shift the boundaries so as to categorize and analyze things together based on their medium/-a, or material/substance, it has the potential to open up new avenues for interpretation.  For the study of figurines (as well as other objects), an approach that focuses on intermateriality, intramateriality, and medium specificity has been almost non-existant.  Nevertheless, the more ways that we have for thinking about such objects, the less likely we are to get ‘stuck’ in one interpretation (i.e. the ‘mother/fertility goddess’ interpretations), and new approaches can only lead to richer, more nuanced (and more interesting!) understandings about the past.

- Emanuela Bocancea