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Architectural Spaces and Hybrid Practices in Northern Mesopotamia
Sevil Baltali-Tirpan (Yeditepe University)

This paper investigates the socio-cultural meanings of hybrid practices in domestic and ritual-architectural spaces from northern Mesopotamian Late Chalcolithic period archaeological sites. During this period (fourth millennium BC) northern Mesopotamian sites reveal widespread distribution of southern Uruk-style material cultural elements along with indigenous styles. The recent archaeological research on the problem has suggested that interregional interactions in the form of exchange relationships, movement of people and establishment of trade colonies had resulted in the flow and blending of multiple cultural practices.

I particularly investigate the active role of individuals and groups in the creation of hybrid material culture through architectural analysis. I apply a diachronic and comparative analysis of architecture in order to trace the processes of transfer and recontextualization of different traditions in the organization and use of space. Therefore, I developed an integrative architectural analysis that takes into account the three major dimensions of architecture: (1) architecture as conceived (design and organization of space), (2) architecture as built (construction and technology), and (3) architecture as lived (use of space).

The integrative architectural analysis enables the detection of hybrid and non-hybrid practices that communicate both canonical (common architectural conventions that reflect larger socio-cosmic principles) and indexical messages (the particular status of inhabitants). The data for this presentation are derived from my analysis of architecture from the northern Mesopotamian sites of Arslantepe, Hassek Höyük and Hacinebi located in eastern and southeastern Turkey, and Tepe Gawra located in northern Iraq.

Not What It Seams: Technological Hybridity in Colonial Peruvian Textiles
Carrie Brezine (Harvard University)

Textiles excavated from the colonial town of Magdalena de Cao Viejo on the north coast of Peru provide an unprecedented chance to examine changes in Andean textile technology under Spanish occupation. Pre-columbian Andean textiles are among the finest in the world, showing a wide range of techniques and unique skill in and control over the fiber medium. Textiles were produced with minimal tools and maximum intellectual engagement. European cloth of the sixteenth century could also be of high quality, and was manufactured with a great deal of complex, automated machinery. What happened to these distinct traditions when they collided in the context of Spanish colonial occupation of Peru?

Cloth found at Magdalena ranges from indigenous styles which can be traced back to the Pre-Columbian Chimu culture, to silk velvets and other European imports. Between these two stylistic extremes are many artifacts which show a combination of European and indigenous materials, technology, structure, and embellishments. By carefully examining the structure of cloth, we can deduce the technology used in its manufacture. Additional details such as shape, size, and seaming show how European methods of constructing clothing were applied to indigenous textiles, creating a mode of colonial dress different from its Andean and European predecessors. Changes in the method and machinery of production reflect not simply technology imposed by conquerors or a desire for greater efficiency in a critical industry, but rather a re-creation of self- and community identity in a context of intense social change.

Renaissance Italianate Pipil Potters: A New Approach to Hybrid Ceramics in the Colonial Americas
Jeb J. Card (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)

Brimmed plates were the primary serving vessel of early to mid-sixteenth-century Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador, an early location for Spanish colonial San Salvador. These plates were produced and painted by Pipil artisans, but incorporated forms from the Renaissance Mediterranean world. Fads and fashions, as well as larger changes in material culture reflecting demographic and political upheaval, in the Old World were reflected and reproduced by native of the New World. In particular, Italian influences were spreading throughout Western Europe and into its colonies, as Renaissance artistry became highly valued. One example of this artwork was the utilization of majolica vessels by Italian painters as canvases for brilliantly colored scenes from antiquity and myth. Valued as art objects by collectors, the intensive study of these painted vessels has produced additional information on form and chronology applicable to more mundane majolica vessels, and in turn to non-majolica copies of these vessels. This information allows for detailed chronology through cross-dating for the first crucial centuries of European global colonization. In the Ciudad Vieja case, this cross-dating calls into question the length and nature of the occupation of the early colonial settlement. The distribution of these vessels, combined with other aspects of traditional pottery production within San Salvador, suggests substantial adoption of these new hybrid vessels by indigenous consumers, and parallels with material culture in other new communities substantially formed by displaced migrants and refugees.

Exploring Culture Contact through Style and Technology
Melissa Chatfield (Stanford University)

Following long held disciplinary practices, archaeologists attempt to reconstruct culture movement on the basis of style, decorative or technological, by assigning artifacts to a cultural group and putting objects of ambiguous style into a mixed category, sometimes called ‘transitional’ or ‘hybrid.’ Despite the fact that other disciplines have actively explored, engaged, and problematized the idea of hybridity, theoretical models in archaeology seldom address the issue of hybridity in material culture or what it means in terms of the cultural interaction that lead to production of the object. Archaeologists agree that decoration and technology vary independently in the manufacturing process and are reinterpreted as local people use the objects, generating artifacts of ambiguous cultural affiliation. The context of use, public or private, can be used in conjunction with style and technology to reveal information about the nature of the tasks and cultural interaction that took place (colonizing, immigration, direct/indirect control, etc). Acknowledging the social nature of artifacts, I will address the issue by placing primacy on the use-context as an indicator of cultural affiliation, then evaluating both decoration and technology. Evidence from pottery used in mortuary structures from the Inca and Spanish Colonial periods in the Cuzco region of Peru will be presented in support of this approach. The decorative characterization relies on definitions from earlier work in Cuzco, while the technological analysis uses sherds to evaluate firing methods, open bonfires vs. closed kilns, through the performance characteristics of the clays. In particular, by comparing maturation temperatures of clay pastes formulated for short duration, low-temperature open firing procedures with those suited for long duration, moderate-temperature kiln firings, it is possible to characterize the original mode of firing, identify the introduction of Spanish kiln technology to the indigenous pottery sequence, and interpret the nature of the indigenous-Spanish interaction at the site. Funding for this project was made possible in part by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Cuzco Archaeology Institute, and the Bernard Selz Foundation.

The Kayenta Diaspora and Salado Meta-Identity in the Ancient U.S. Southwest
Jeffrey Clark (Center for Desert Archaeology)

In response to social and environmental stresses several thousand people emigrated from the Kayenta region in northeastern Arizona during the late 13th century A.D. Some of these groups traveled over 300 km to the river valleys of southeastern Arizona. Here they encountered established Hohokam irrigation communities with much larger populations. Despite their loss of homeland and subsequent dispersal, the Kayenta were a powerful minority who maintained a community in diaspora based on shared heritage. This heritage is reflected in both ritual and domestic material culture. The Kayenta diasporic community persisted for nearly century, influencing ceramic styles and controlling obsidian circulation over a broad region

Initially, the arrival of Kayenta groups caused considerable tension among socially distant local groups. The latter aggregated into walled settlements and built platform mounds to mark their agricultural territories. Both locals and migrants overtly expressed their respective identities through distinctive decorated ceramic styles.

After a generation or two a “Salado” ideology emerged that selectively incorporated symbols and practices of both groups. A new Salado polychrome ceramic tradition played an important role in this ideology. Although the descendants of migrants developed this ceramic tradition, Salado polychrome vessels ultimately dominated the decorated assemblages of both migrant and local settlements, replacing earlier divisive styles.

Other migrant and local material culture remained distinctive in each river valley throughout the prehistoric sequence. The common denominator in these highly variable assemblages is Salado polychrome pottery. Hence the ideology associated with this pottery did not replace or negate previous Hohokam and Kayenta identities. Instead these identities were incorporated within and subordinated to an overarching Salado “meta-identity.” This meta-identity formed rapidly in an attempt to transcend a well-defined social boundary during a time of demographic collapse and crisis.

Continuity and Change in Early 18th Century Apalachee Colono Wares
Ann S. Cordell (Florida Museum of Natural History)

Colono wares of the Apalachee Province of La Florida may be considered examples of “hybrid material culture.” This pottery, also known as “mission ware” consists of plain and red painted pottery made in European vessel shapes by Apalachee potters between 1650 and 1702. It is presumed that this pottery was made at the direct instigation of Spaniards to supplement tablewares that may have been in short supply. Studies of Colono wares from Mission San Luis de Talimali in Florida show that there is continuity with traditional Apalachee pottery in terms of indigenous materials and manufacturing techniques, but change in those traditions in terms of incorporating Spanish vessel forms. Traditional Apalachee-style pottery and Colono ware brimmed vessels and pitchers have also been recovered at the site of Old Mobile in French colonial Louisiana. These are thought to have been made by Apalachee refugees who migrated from San Luis to Old Mobile 1704. The recovery of this pottery at Old Mobile provided an exceptional opportunity to document continuity and change in Apalachee pottery manufacture in general and Colono wares in particular. Toward this end, analyses of the presumed Apalachee pottery from Old Mobile and known Apalachee pottery from Mission San Luis were undertaken. The results documented similarities in style, vessel forms, tempering practices, and many aspects of manufacturing technology between San Luis and Old Mobile samples and supported the premise that Apalachee refugees made the traditional Apalachee-style pottery and most of the Colono wares at Old Mobile. Further hybridization of Colono wares from Old Mobile was observed. Changes appear to reflect the new cultural milieu at Old Mobile, which included French and Canadian colonists and local and refugee Indian groups. The results are consistent with expectations for continuity and change in traditional pottery made by societies undergoing relocation and/or colonization.

Contextualizing Indigenous Copper Consumption and ‘Hybridization’ in Technological ‘Style’ in the Early Contact Period North American Midcontinent
Kathleen L. Ehrhardt (Illinois State Museum)

European encounters with native peoples of eastern North America through early phases of contact (16th and 17th centuries) were accompanied by exchanges of foreign materials and objects that were of immediate and lasting interest to native consumers. Goods moved into the midcontinent with surprising rapidity, appearing in the Mississippi Valley well before Europeans themselves. Focusing attention on the intentions, motives, and material and social dynamics of native material consumption at these extreme frontier fringes of the then “known world” and as foreigners eventually reach tentatively into the region, provides singular opportunity to study the relations among native technologies and the availability of European materials on the one hand, and early opportunities for and contexts of material, technological, and social change on the other. This essay situates this critical time with regard to the influences of colonial systems and the applicability of such concepts as acculturation, creolization, and ethnogenesis to its analysis. It outlines an approach to the study of material consumption using a technological “systems” framework and technological “style” approach. Using the appearance and distribution of several thousand pieces of European-derived copper-base metal and the objects made from it over a large seventeenth-century Illinois village as a case study, I explore the technological and social aspects of material appropriation and the domains of crafting activity, such as production, multicrafting, and specialization that surround transforming European metals to ornamentation and incorporating these special types of “hybrid” material objects into everyday and specialized use contexts.

The Industrious Exiles: An Analysis of Flaked Glass Tools from the Leprosarium at Kalawao, Moloka'i
James L. Flexner (University of California Berkeley)
Colleen L. Morgan (University of California Berkeley)

Archaeologies of colonial encounters have documented many cases of the adaptation of indigenous stone tool technologies to introduced materials such as bottle glass and ceramics. Other cases have documented the creation of innovative flaked glass tool traditions, at times for the purposes of consumption by European audiences. This case study will examine an innovative worked glass technology created by individuals diagnosed with leprosy and exiled to a remote settlement at Kalawao on Kalaupapa peninsula, Moloka'i Island, Hawaii between 1866 and 1900. The presence of a unique glass tool technology in Kalawao provides a strong counterpoint to the focus on alcohol abuse, laziness, and despair among the majority in the exile community during the early years of the leprosarium in orthodox historical literature. While some of the worked glass from the leprosarium appears to follow forms typical of traditional Hawaiian volcanic glass tools, adapted to the newly-introduced medium of industrially produced bottle glass, other artifacts indicate remarkable innovations for the region. These artifacts were produced by people who had limited access to resources from the outside world because of the imposed isolation in which they lived. As a result, a certain amount of technological innovation related to necessity is to be expected. However, certain artifacts that appear to contain more stylistic innovations, as well as artifacts with forms that appear to be adapted to leprosy-related disabilities, make the assemblage of worked glass collected and analyzed during three years of archaeological field and laboratory research in Kalawao compelling when considered alongside other worked glass assemblages from the colonial world. These artifacts provide valuable insights into the technical impulses and abilities of exiles living in the leprosarium at Kalawao, material for reflections upon toolmaking activities, isolation, boredom, innovation, and the archaeology of disabilities.

‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple’: Interpreting skeuomorphism in the archaeological record
Catherine Frieman (University of Oxford)

Skeuomorphism—defined here as the conscious imitation in one material of objects typically made in another—is frequently invoked by archaeologists seeking to explain changes in technology and value systems in the past. In this paper I will address the use of skeuomorphism as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ interpretative tool for understanding culture change and the introduction of novel materials and techniques.

I propose to briefly discuss how the concept of skeuomorphism has changed since being coined in the 19th century and how it has been used (and misused) as a framework to explain technological and social change in the archaeological record. I will focus specifically on the Neolithic-Bronze Age transition in prehistoric Europe and how stone and pottery have been used as a proxy to discuss the introduction of metal and metallurgy into society. Moreover, by drawing attention to the broader social and material context of a number of supposed stone skeuomorphs of metal I will question the simple one-to-one relationship between them and their suggested prototypes. I intend to demonstrate that while cross-craftsmanship is a key part of adopting and adapting to new technologies, the simplest explanation is not always the right one.

Bone Tool Technology on the Middle Missouri: Experiments and Innovations
Janet L. Griffits (University of Arizona)

When European and Euroamerican explorers first entered the Northern Plains, they found large earthlodge villages along the Missouri River occupied by the Mandan, Hidatsa, and others. The Mandan and Hidatsa were central to native trading systems and Euroamerican traders sought to insert themselves into those trade systems. Consequently, the Middle Missouri villagers had early access to trade items. Assemblages from five prehistoric and historic sites indicate that the Mandan and Hidatsa began an initial period of experimentation using the new metal implements to shape their bone technology. They made some tools in traditional shapes, but substantially changed others. Cutting and chopping using metal knives and axes replaced earlier percussion based manufacturing techniques, and several bone artifact types took on more elaborate forms. In some cases, it appears that the craftsperson was simply experimenting with using new cutting technologies. A few bone artifacts appear for the first time in the historic period; some borrowed from other Native American groups, others replicated European or Euroamerican goods. The patterns in tool manufacture and use reflect changes in the broader societal contexts.

This study uses several theoretical perspectives to examine technological choice and bone technology, including a simplified behavioral archaeological and life history approach, combined with Social Construction of Technology and insights from practitioners. This combined perspective enables the researcher to examine and identify tradeoffs between different techniques and tool raw materials to illuminate some of the choices made by tool makers and users. Post-contact technological change is often modeled on very simple assumptions in which metal tools quickly and inevitably replace stone and bone technology, a view that portrays the Native Americans as passive recipients. Detailed analysis shows that processes were in fact more complex. Tool makers and users took an active role, evaluating how materials worked, and accepting or rejecting particular technologies.

Acknowledgment of funding:
This project was made possible through funding through the University of Arizona Department of Anthropology Cummings and Haury Funds.

A Study of Hybrid Maya Ceramics: Integrating Foreign Styles in the Sibun Valley, Belize
Eleanor Harrison-Buck (University of New Hampshire)
Ellen Spensley (Boston University)
Patricia A. McAnany (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)

A study of hybrid Maya ceramics in the Sibun Valley (Belize), showing the integration of foreign styles and technology, points to marked changes in the political landscape during the Terminal Classic (ca. AD 780-900)—a period characterized by increased warfare, population movements, societal collapse, and shifting political power. The decline of numerous political centers in the “Maya heartland" of Petén (Guatemala), along with sites in the Upper Belize Valley, may have sparked small population movements eastward into the Sibun Valley and other parts of Belize. The presence of imitation volcanic ash wares—emulative of technological styles used in the Upper Belize Valley and Petén region—were found in small quantities at sites in the Sibun Valley. The imitation ash wares could only be detected through compositional and chemical studies and suggest direct training from non-local potters. During this time, as many centers in the Upper Belize Valley and Petén collapsed, northern Yucatec polities, such as Chichén Itzá, rose to power. An expanded trade network—possibly administered by Chichén Itzá— extended more than 400 km along the Caribbean coastline. In this way, Yucatec-style traits, including circular shrine architecture and locally-produced ceramics incorporating northern attributes, were introduced in the Sibun River valley and elsewhere within the eastern Caribbean watershed. Through stylistic, chemical and compositional analyses of ceramic material, this research seeks to address the complexities of the “foreign” interaction and integration that occurred in the Sibun Valley during the Terminal Classic period. The results of this study highlight the complexity of interpreting hybrid material culture and the dynamic nature of the processes and mechanisms through which groups construct, maintain, and negotiate their identity.

Acknowledgments:
National Science Foundation funded the field research (Grant #BCS-0096603 awarded to Patricia McAnany), as well as the INAA and petrographic study of ceramics from the Sibun Valley (Grant #BCS-0638592 awarded to Eleanor Harrison-Buck) reported upon herein. Leslie Cecil & Michael Glascock conducted the INAA at the MURR Lab of the University of Missouri and Ellen Spensley conducted the petrographic analysis at the Geoarchaeology Lab of Boston University.

Of Earth and Clay: Ceramics of the African Atlantic in the Caribbean
Mark Hauser (University of Notre Dame)

This paper offers an overview of ceramic traditions in the caribbean associated with the African Diaspora. This pottery, rather than being a single type or kind of ceramic is highly variable, a variability that bespeaks the complex and interwoven histories of Caribbean peoples. This pottery offers a different and unique sets of lenses on the cultural experience of displaced, indentured and enslaved caribbean folk, the scales of its expression, and the historical forces that shaped it. First, these pots embody the techniques, the practical savoir-faire, the repeated gestures and inventiveness of their makers. These knowledges, however, extend beyond the material vessels, and connect us to broader cultural narratives of the diaspora, conjuring, on the one hand, glimpses of potential cultural ancestries, their resilience, and plasticity against the grain of the Middle Passage; and, on the other hand, the networks of transmission of craft traditions, their social settings, their inscription in kinship, and gendered dimensions.

Small Beginnings: Experimental Technologies and Hybrid Diaspora
Katherine Hayes (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)

That there has been much interaction between African American and Native American populations in New England is apparent in historical records. From censuses with racial designations to more recent court cases in which racial ascriptions are brought to bear on tribal recognition, the results of a centuries-old entanglement is clear, but the foundations of that relationship are not. Further, more recent racial discourses have persistently kept Black and Indian histories distinct from one another. What were the “small beginnings” of such entanglements, that led to hybrid diasporas? In this paper I discuss the site of Sylvester Manor (Shelter Island, New York), established as a provisioning plantation in 1652, at which a plural community including Europeans, Native Manhanset, and enslaved Africans lived and worked. Although the nature of the interactions between the Manhanset and Africans is undocumented, a close examination of changes in local ceramic production (through composition studies and optical petrography) show the contribution of new techniques, and a process of experimentation in various stages of production. These include the incorporation of a shell temper processed as quicklime, and the changes in firing conditions necessitated by the temper, with varying degrees of success. The changes suggest specific contexts for interactions. I explore these through both semiotics and Latour’s ideas on the materiality of knowledge construction as a way to posit the basis of multiple conventions on the meaning of difference. The interactions, viewed by Europeans, may have been cause to create stricter categories of difference based on race. Yet viewed by the participants, a hybrid material may have been grounds for affiliation, and by extension for hybrid diasporas.

Long-Term Patterns of Ethnogenesis in Indigenous Amazonia
Jonathan D. Hill (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)

This paper will explore how ethnogenesis, hybridity, persistent identities, and related concepts are currently being developed in Amazonianist anthropology. The paper’s theoretical approach will build upon James Clifford’s characterization (2004, Looking Several Ways: Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska, Current Anthropology 45(1): ) of ethnogenesis as a process of ‘authentically remaking’ new social identities through creatively rediscovering and refashioning components of ‘tradition,’ such as oral narratives, written texts, and material artifacts. A brief overview of the ‘Comparative Arawakan Histories’ project (2002, Jonathan Hill and Fernando Santos-Granero, eds., Comparative Arawakan Histories, Urbana: University of Illinois Press) will serve as a way of establishing the immediate intellectual context for the much more rigorous integration of research across sub-disciplines that is currently emerging. The concept of ethnogenesis has emerged as an important means for stimulating research that cuts across sub-disciplinary boundaries.

The core of the paper will consist of a sampling of research resulting from a series of workshops and meetings that brought together specialists on Amazonian ethnology, archaeology, linguistics, and ethnohistory from Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. These scholars were selected specifically on the basis of their ability to bring their own research specialties to bear on historical issues of ethnogenesis and identity-construction at an initial workshop on ‘Mapping Cultures’ at Lund University in Sweden (2006), a double session on ‘Long-term Patterns of Ethnogenesis in Indigenous Amazonia’ at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, D.C. (2007), and a concluding workshop on ‘Amazonian Ethno-Linguistics’ at Lund University (2008). Specific case studies to be examined will include Eduardo Neves' study of ethnogenesis in the Central Amazon floodplain, Kay and Franz Scaramelli's work on ethnogenesis and the emergence of 'generic indios' in the middle Orinoco region, Ellen Basso’s analysis of Amazonian ritual communication in relation to multilingual social networks, and my own study of shell necklaces as tokens of colonial economic hybridity in the Upper Rio Negro Region or Venezuela.

Hybrid Cultures…and Hybrid Peoples: An Archaeology of Materiality, Perception, and Biological Transformation in Colonial Peru
Haagen D. Klaus (Utah Valley University)
Manuel D. Tam (Universidad Nacional de Trujillo)

The colonial conquest of South America in the 16th century represented a “total biocultural phenomenon” which affected every imaginable aspect of human life. Only recently has archaeological attention begun to shift towards the study of this period in the Central Andes to focus largely on material manifestations of religious syncretism. In this paper, we however consider mutual linkages between syncretism and biological change emerging from new and hybrid forms of materiality, cultural perception, and ethnogenesis.

Archaeological study of the colonial-era Chapel of San Pedro de Mórrope (A.D. 1536-1751) in the Lambayeque region on the north coast of Peru indicates a complex syntheses of material culture emerged in Mórrope from the tensions created between postcontact Spanish and indigenous Mochica socioeconomic agendas. The chapel itself embodied a striking blend of Spanish and pre-Hispanic Mochica religious architecture. A particularly intense locus of culture transfer was focused into the emergence of hybrid Iberian-Andean mortuary patterns that combined elements of Catholic ritual and religious iconography with 1,500 year-old Mochica mortuary material culture including ritual uses of human bones. Such dynamism, we think, was a reflection of colonial Mochica ethnogenesis. However, this new group identity – as mirrored in material remains – was interwoven with new cultural constructions of human biology. Population genetic analyses of inherited tooth sizes among colonial Mochica skeletal remains detect high levels of gene flow that formed a biologically homogenized postcontact population. Ethnogenesis aided in the deconstruction of precontact identity and identity politics. Attendant mate exchange networks fell apart. It is likely this process of cultural hybridization played a central role in creating widened perceptions of group boundaries and resulted in intermarriage, biological hybridization, and new identities binding diverse Mochica groups. Methodologically, this study aims to consider several potential cross-disciplinary avenues in which to explore the cultural and biological dimensions of culture contact, syncretism and ethnogenesis through a holistic approach.

This research was generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Tinker Foundation, and The Ohio State University’s Office of International Affairs, Center for Latin American Studies, and Department of Anthropology.

Hybridity and Its Homologues: The Material Culture of Colonial Encounters in the Pueblo Southwest and on the Northern Plains
Matthew Liebmann (Harvard University)

In recent years, archaeologists have used the term hybridity to describe and interpret amalgamated forms of material culture with increasing frequency. But do postcolonial notions of hybridity (sensu Bhabha 1994; Hall 1990; Young 1995) differ in any meaningful ways from models of cultural mixture traditionally employed by anthropologists such as syncretism, creolization, and acculturation? Or is this simply a matter of semantics, citation practices, and the adoption of yet another example of trendy anthropological jargon by archaeologists? This paper will attempt to parse the utility of the term hybridity for contemporary archaeology, examining case studies from seventeenth-century Pueblo ceramics and twentieth-century Plains Indian quilting. It also examines how archaeology might offer something back to postcolonial theory through the study of hybridity not just across the colonizer/colonized divide, but by "de-centering" this concept through the investigation of cultural blending as it has been manifested withiin the material culture of colonized populations.

Set in Stone: On hybrid iconographies and social relationships in prehistoric and Roman Europe
Christopher M. Roberts (Arizona State University)

Hybrid iconographies can inform us about past situations of cultural contact. With this paper I hope to achieve two goals. First, I hope to explore a theoretical framework based on Erwin Panofsky’s concept of iconology and post-structural approaches to meaning, and use it to explain both how iconographies can hybridize, and how we can understand this process in the past. Second, I hope to connect different processes of hybridization to possible relationships between social groups in a time of cultural contact through Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical project.

Post-structural approaches to meaning and signification suggest that each act of artistic creation and interpretation takes place in reference to the past experiences of the person involved in the process. To understand a hybrid iconography, therefore, we must systematically compare it
to sources of experience that potentially informed its creation. Limitations exist on the total potential experiences a person can have and these can be predicted through the social theory of Bourdieu. His concepts of habitus, capital, and the social field allow us to understand how actors in social groups limit the potential experiences of their neighbours. By connecting the formation of social groups and the creation of hybrid iconographies with social theory I hope to provide a better understanding of hybridization and use it as a means to understand past social and cultural encounters.

I plan to demonstrate this framework by analyzing hybrid notions of Mediterranean stone sculpture in Iron Age and Roman Europe. In the Roman instance I argue that Bourdieu’s theory can be used to connect the form hybrid iconographies took to the imperial nature of the incoming Roman influence. I plan to contrast the Roman case to an Iron Age example by arguing that though some Mediterranean influence is present the situation of culture contact is quite different.

The Chatelperronian: Hybrid Culture or Independent Innovation?
Clare Tolmie (University of Iowa)

The introduction of new technology at the transition from the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic in Western Europe includes changes in the production of stone tools, and the introduction of bone, antler and ivory tools. This paper will focus on the latter technological innovation. Worked durable animal material (bone, antler, ivory and teeth) was once thought to be the product of modern humans who migrated into western Europe. Within the past 30 years has it become apparent that Neanderthals (the indigenous European human population in the Middle and Early Upper Palaeolithic) also manufactured bone artefacts. Two conflicting hypotheses have been proposed to explain the appearance of this material in Neanderthal contexts: an autochthonous development that is roughly contemporary with changes in modern human culture, or an allocthonous development derived from contact with modern humans. Were Neanderthals active creators of new technology or passive recipients of introduced technology?

Independent development of similar technologies as a solution to similar problems occurs throughout human history. I argue that both Neanderthals and modern humans were experiencing less stable climatic conditions and environmental fluctuation. New forms of cultural expression may have served to reinforce social networks as social competition for resources increased as modern humans colonized the area. New technologies that required the use of softer manufacturing tools than flint may have been a response to changes in subsistence and/or environment. This paper will critically assess evidence for Neanderthals as active creators of new technology including tool production, use and discard; use of ornaments; and similarities and differences in raw material selection between Neanderthals and modern humans. Evidence for interaction in the form of traded items, interdigitation of cultural remains and dating of the origins of the new forms of technology will be assessed to determine how Neanderthals engaged in new cultural behavior.