Stone, people and place

Abstract

Welcome to Time and Mind 14.2. A great deal of the focus of our journal is on the interaction of human minds with non-human environments, objects and entities – animals, plants, rocks, and the other components that make up the world around us – and how these interactions are encoded in material culture and archaeological remains. This issue is no different, and in particular emphasises the relationship between human consciousness and the cold surface of stone in a range of different cultural and ecological contexts, through cave art, monument construction and tablet inscription. To begin, in their paper – which has already attracted a great deal of attention in the media – Yafit Kedar, Gil Kedar and Ran Barkai present a compelling argument about the possible role of hypoxia (oxygen deprivation), and the altered states of consciousness that this condition entails, in the creation of palaeolithic cave art. Drawing on experimental fieldwork, the authors suggest that burning torches used to illuminate deep caverns were active in reducing oxygen levels in these spaces and, as a result, inducing hypoxic altered states in prehistoric artists. While there has been a long association of cave art with altered states of consciousness of various kinds, induced through diverse techniques such as rhythmic drumming, dancing, sensory deprivation, psychoactive substances and so on, the novel argument here is that it is the cave itself, and the oxygen levels within, that is active in provoking the altered state. Cave art, then, is an expression of the interaction between human artists and the cave itself. In ‘Pueblo ethnography, Sopris archaeology, and the sacred geography of Sopris rock art’ Thomas Huffman and Frank Earley explore the sacred geography of the Sopris culture in Colorado. Drawing on ethnographic work on the cosmological models and cosmogonic myths of the Pueblo Tewa and Tanoa people, Huffman and Earley suggest that the Sopris culture was likely related to that of the present day Pueblo people, rather than to a hypothesised huntergatherer group. The paper contains some fascinating observations of the sacred geography of the Pueblo worldview, and demonstrates how ethnographic insights can be drawn on for archaeological interpretation. Staying in Pre-Columbian America, Robert Weiner and Ema Smith’s paper ‘Great houses for whom?’ presents a new interpretation of the monumental Chacoan Great Houses of the American southwest. Again, drawing on comparative ethnographic material from indigenous American cultures and further afield, Weiner and Smith make the case for understanding the Great Houses in TIME AND MIND 2021, VOL. 14, NO. 2, 179–180 https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2021.1926776