Material Memory

With the emergence of chiefdoms, a new ideology of inherited social difference had to be created and sustained over time. One way that inherited social in- equalities may have been constructed, legitimated, and maintained is through the transmission of heirlooms or artifacts that objectified a collective ancestral past. Archaeologists have generally viewed heirlooms as anomalies or complications in the archaeological record. In this paper, however, I argue that, if identified, heirlooms have the potential to provide a richer and finer-grained understanding of the human past, in general, and to aid in the determination of hereditary rank, in particular. I discuss and compare the ethnographic evidence for heirloom use in bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, and, based on this evidence, I suggest criteria by which heirlooms might be identified in the archaeological record. Some examples of possible heirlooms from the archaeological literature are also presented. Finally, an evolutionary model for the circulation and disposal of heirlooms is proposed.

Though the presence of the past rightly may be argued to be conditional everywhere, its truth rests heavier on some places. Teriberka is such a place, a small coastal settlement on the Kola peninsula. Once a prosperous Soviet fishing harbour it now epitomizes the depression and despair on the post-Soviet Russian periphery. Though post-Soviet seems quite misplaced here, because Soviet is still conspicuously present in Teriberka. Omnipresent, in fact, through its tenacious albeit ruining material legacy. Thus, for those who live here Soviet is not an optional past, a voluntary ‘something’ you may or may not be attentive to; it is Teriberka - the very world you are being in. How does this condition inflict upon understandings of heritage and significance? Is significance necessarily a voluntary attribute of humanly assigned value or may it be differently conceived, as something enacted and experienced rather than ascribed? Exploring these issues in relation to Teriberka’s ruining socialist past, the paper more generally is a commentary on the experience of living with a past considered far too insignificant to be assigned value as heritage but which still is so immensely significant that it impacts on nearly every aspect of life.

Experiments in replicating facsimiles of Late Neolithic engraved slate plaques from southwestern Iberia suggest that variation related to fine-motor skills is greater between individual engravers than within the work of a single engraver. This implies that the work of different individuals producing certain classes of material culture may be distinguishable on the basis of repetitive, idiosyncratic traits. These studies also generate otherwise unobtainable information about the experience of plaque making. We examine past and present methodological attempts to differentiate unconscious, individual styles from intentional, culturally mediated styles, and discuss why in some cases it is extremely difficult to separate such variation. We explore the link between individual variation and theoretical notions of the individual, and its implications for understanding the organization, transmission, and shared expression of ancient social practices.

This article explores memories of slavery in the Abomey region, in the heart of Fon country and of the pre-colonial kingdom of Dahomey, as they are revealed through the Egun cult, a Yoruba form of ancestor cult. In the local debates that have surrounded the emergence and then the development of this cult, which began principally among Yoruba with slave origins, there are noticeable continuities and slippages in the place made for slavery in Abomey society. One discerns simultaneously the emergence, in the lineages claiming Yoruba origins, of attempts at liberation from the stigma of slavery and at a claim of Yoruba authenticity. Involvement in the Egun cult, at first tolerated and later appropriated by the Fon, is at the centre of this process.

The engraved stone plaques of prehistoric Iberia, discovered in hundreds of Neolithic megaliths, caves, and rockshelters throughout southwest Iberia, have enjoyed an enduring place in the imagination of archaeologists since the 19th century (Figure 1). Prehistorians have suggested the plaques, which are made primarily of slate and approximately 15 cm in height, functioned as amulets, idols, or insignias and that their designs represented the dead or divinities, including the European Mother Goddess. Other portable objects found in Neolithic tombs of the Peninsula, such as carved bone and stone ‘eyed idols’, have also been viewed as representations of the Mother Goddess. To many, most notably Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994), all these objects were manifestations of the great Mother Goddess cult, which was believed to have originated in the Near East and was associated with the spread of agriculture – as well as egalitarian, peaceful, and gynocentric societies - to Europe. However, many archaeologists have argued that European Neolithic society was neither egalitarian nor peaceful, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was particularly gynocentric. Nonetheless, the idea of the Mother Goddess cult remains in the specific ways that Neolithic portable art in the Iberian Peninsula is interpreted. There are some problems with this interpretation, however. With respect to the Iberian plaques, for example, relatively few plaques have features that might be considered anthropomorphic, and there is little that is unambiguously female or goddess-like about these few plaques. Even in the case of the more clearly anthropomorphic bone figurines from Andalucía, some have male genitalia. Given the abundance (over 2000) and extensive distribution (from Leiria, Portugal to Granada, Spain), of the engraved plaques the variability in their design and form, and the time span over which they were used (500-1000 years), it is unlikely that any one model can ‘explain’ the plaque phenomenon (or Neolithic portable art in general). 

In this essay, I provide some basic information on the engraved plaques and summarize the results of recent research, which is more fully developed in my book Heraldry for the Dead: Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia (University of Texas Press, 2008) and is based on the comprehensive on-line catalogue of the plaques - ESPRIT (or the Engraved Stone Plaque Registry and Inquiry Tool, http://research2.its.uiowa.edu/iberian/index.php). Analyses of the plaques’ distribution and form suggest that the majority of the plaques (the Classic plaques) recorded the genealogical and lineage affiliation of elite individuals in southwest Iberia. In other words, they may have served as a kind of heraldry for a class of ancestral dead.

Among the thousands of engraved slate plaques found in the Late Neolithic collective burials of southwest Iberia are plaque-relics - fragments of engraved plaques that were reshaped, most often into trapezoidal or rectangular forms, and sometimes perforated. In this paper, I examine the Iberian plaque-relics both in their specific attributes as material culture and as material mnemonics. I draw on a range of approaches and different scales of analysis, specifically by examining their regional variability by frequency, ‘parent’ plaque-type, decorative motifs, perforations, size and form. I conclude by exploring how the plaque-relics were shaped by the social landscape of which they were part and how they may have played a role in transforming that landscape.

This paper explores the unsettling effects of the fundamental opposition between lived memory and constructed history. It studies how alternate history can be created by the timeless practice of recollecting facts through memory. The theoretic premise of this paper is rooted in the study of sites of memory by Pierre Nora to further enrich our understanding of material memory in Aanchal Malhotra's Remnants of a Separation. Postmodernism has questioned the validity of history as a grand narrative. This paper reflects on the disintegration of certain traditional views about Partition narratives and the humanist notion of unitary representation of reality in history. It tries to situate the significance of memory in establishing a palpable reality suggests alternative pathways of constructing history.