People Make Fire: Archaeology and the Art of Sonja Stiefel

Abstract

Archaeologists find art significant because of its role in both their presentation and their understanding of the past. Art serves to unify disparate and fragmentary evidence into a reconstructed whole while the artistic process serves as a parallel to, or guide for, engaging with prehistory. Consequently, the number of archaeologists studying contemporary art has steadily increased over the last decade. This paper continues the trend. It examines the work of contemporary American painter Sonja Stiefel and her images of people using ancient tools to start fires. Her art reconstructs the past, but is itself built on her present-day attempts physically to replicate ancient technologies. Sonja Stiefel reconstructs material culture and clearly values tangible, physical objects. However, she also crafts paintings in order to preserve a human narrative she has gained from extensive experience both replicating ancient technologies and recreating the social interactions of past people through her active involvement in the Society for Creative Anachronism. She uses the past as a function of the present and uses art to capture the meaning she gained through that process.