Prefigured in the Human Mind and Body: Toward an Ethnographically Informed Cognitive Archaeology of Metaphor and Religion

Abstract

This article proposes that the particular use and modification of landscapes—such as through the application of rock art and the construction of living spaces—are material projections of the shared spiritual and social experiences and beliefs of culturally related people. It is argued that people within nonindustrial cultures in particular believe that spirit beings cohabit their everyday world, largely due to the culturally agreed emphasis that these people place on altered states of consciousness, particularly dreaming and visions. Referring to the gathering and hunting San and the agriculturalist and pastoralist Zulu from southern Africa as primary ethnographic examples (with brief reference to the Blackfoot Indians of the western Prairies), ways of looking at physically bounded container-like areas and movements into and out of these contained spaces are explored in order to assist archaeological interpretations of the material record. The experiences of “soul loss” among San shamans are portrayed against rock surfaces from the perspective of the artist standing within a contained public living space looking outward, whereas the experiences of spirit-helper acquisition among Blackfoot warriors or soul possession among Zulu herders are portrayed against rock surfaces from the perspective of the artist standing outside a contained space looking inward. Among the Blackfoot the space is an isolated camp of spirit helpers, whereas among the Zulu it is the back of the inhabited hut where patrilineal ancestors reside. The metaphor Things Are Embodied Mindscapes applies to the ethnographic and archaeological examples, which include landscapes, settlements, habitation areas, and individual artifacts/motifs.