The Interpretation of Ancient Symbols

The Interpretation of Ancient Symbols TERENCE GRIEDER University of Texas, Austin Two methods of interpreting ancient pictorial symbols are in use: Kubler s configurational method of describing internal relationships of images within a style; and the widely used ethnological method seeking comparable expressions in verbal form in ethnographic and historical documents. Ethnological analogy may offer only comparisons, but ethnology can also define one end of a tradition of symbolic meaning and can be used to generate premises for deductive reasoning. Disjunction of form from meaning does not invalidate ethnographic analogy, as argued by Kubler, but is a cultural phenomenon which can be studied archaeologically. A ceramic sequence, for example, can reveal a disjunction of form from meaning. Configurational analysis of styles in sequence reveals changes of form and of some fundamental kinds of meaning. Ethnological evidence of traditions of meaning within a culture gives some basis for verbalizing the meaning of earlier symbols. The interpretation of ancient symbols requires the use of both configurational analysis of styles and ethnological analysis of traditions of meaning. AMONG THE TRADITIONS of every society is one of symbolism expressed in material products. Products made mainly as vehicles of symbolism present special problems of interpretation to archaeologists and cultural historians. Two methods for interpreting the symbolism of ancient cultures are currently in use. They differ principally in what is considered acceptable evidence of a tradition of symbolism: the configurational school, represented by George Kubler, holding that interpretation must confine itself to iconographic clusters within single periods to avoid disjunction of meaning from form (Kubler 1970: 142); and the ethnological school arguing that forms may be assumed to retain their symbolic meanings if the culture can be shown to be essentially unchanged in other respects. The use of tthnological analogy in the explanation of symbols has been the target of Kubler s criticism. Kubler (1967: 11-12) has rolled out the big gun of Panofsky s (1960:84) principle of disjunction against the use of ethnological analogy in the interpretation of symbols from prehistoric contexts. He argues that we may expect to observe disjunctions of form and meaning more often than marked continuity in their association when dealing with successive cultures spanning a duration on the order of magnitude of about one thousand years in the same region (Kubler 1967:12). He proposes instead that the student of the past consider the total visual configuration of an ancient site or group of sites as the primary source of information. Such studies are concerned more with iconographic clusters than with pottwy types and chronology. As long as entire configurations of evidence are under study, the fragmentation of analogizing is minimized (Kubler 1970: 142). Analogy shares with all historical generalization an inductive method of reasoning, and like all inductive methods, its validity increases with the number of traits or examples known relative to the total number. Genuine analogical argument is convincing only when a great many traits are known on both sides of the equation, as for example in Shaw s analysis of his excavations at Igbo Ukwu in Nigeria (Shaw 1970: 269-270). Submitted for publication March 18, 1974 Accepted for publication May 13, 1975 849

850 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [ 77,1975 Analogies, however, also have the capacity to generate premises from which deductions can be made. For example, Furst (1968:148) examined ethnographic sources which share the jaguar theme with Olmec art to arrive at a fact which could be stated as a premise: that in indigenous American societies shamans and jaguars are not merely equivalent, but each is at the same time the other. The conclusion, that jaguars represented in Olmec art represent shamans, is a deduction which is open to attack only through the premise. Furst does not say: (1) recent indigenous groups use jaguar symbols and have such and such other known cultural traits; (2) the ancient Olmecs also used jaguar symbols and had the same cultural traits; (3) therefore, the meaning of the Olmec jaguar symbols is the same as that of recent jaguar symbols. The deductive method is the stronger method, but it has the difficulty that a single negative instance disproves the premise. Furst (1968: 145-148) analyzes some seemingly negative instances to defend the premise. The use of ethnography as a source of principles from which deductive conclusions can be drawn for testing is at least as valuable to archaeologists as its use as a source of material for analogical comparison. The two methods, the configurational and the ethnological, make use of very different forms of evidence. The configurational relies on material evidence in the form of designs, pictures, and sculptures. This is what Kubler (1962:26) calls iconography, but only the graphic is given; the iconic meaning, even to the naming of objects, is inferential. Translation from the graphic to the verbal medium is done by the modern interpreter, with the inclusion of the requisite number of probably ~. The ethnolc.gica1 method in American archaeology accepts the written accounts of the four centuries since the Conquest as the verbal evidence. In ethnography, the informant, who is closer to his material than is the configurational analyst to ancient things, makes the translation from the material or graphic to verbal form. In both methods the ultimate problem is to find a verbal translation for a pictorial symbol which may never have had a specific or adequate verbal equivalent. The controversial point is the validity of assuming traditions of meaning or use which have great antiquity. Assuming that the informant represents a people historically associated with the region, can we expect him to have any traditions which we can reliably identify as having endured from very ancient times? Many of the indigenous American oral traditions are in the form of myths, which, Vansina (1965:157) asserts, are very valuable sources for the history of beliefs... because of their religious character, myths are transmitted with care. Yet no standard for rate of change in myths, or in oral traditions generally, has been widely accepted (cf. Kroeber 1948: 564-568). It is noteworthy that the study of the modern Maya of Zinacantan indicates more ready acceptance of change in material culture than in cosmology and religious attitudes (Vogt 1969: 610-612). If the Zinacantan study reflects a widespread situation, then archaeological records based on material culture give an exaggerated picture of the rate of change within a culture as a whole and myths are among the slowest changing of the elements of a culture. The configurational and ethnological approaches are based on contrary premises. The configurational approach is based on the view that the rate of change in a culture is unpredictable, difficult to discover, and presumably fairly rapid. The ethnological approach is based on the view that a culture in isolation would change slowly and that the factors which cause change most efficiently can be identified in an archaeological record. It assumes that form and meaning will remain joined in a period of cultural stability and that instability sufficient to disjoin them will be discoverable in the material remains. Social and environmental changes and external contacts, for example, are evident in the archaeological records of ancient societies, especially in the form of changes in pottery, which immediately reflects changes that affect the members of a society. Contrary to Kubler s (1970:132) assertion of the uselessness of pottery sequences for the building of cultural history, it is hard to find a material product in any period that provides more immediate and exact information about the state of a society than does pottery. The

Grieder] INTERPRE TA TION OF ANCIENT SYMBOLS 851 extinction of handmade kitchenwares in the United States and the recent rise of art pottery tell a lot about our culture. In Gifford s (1965:342-343) reading of Barton Ramie s history from pottery, new styles show us the relative time and suggest the regional source of the influx of peoples. The study of pottery allows one only rarely to discover the biographies of individuals-one of the preoccupations of traditional art history-but one can learn a good deal about the cultural history of whole societies. The recognition of Teotihuacan style pottery in tombs at Tikal is another of the innumerable examples of cultural history revealed by pottery (Coe 1965:35); and where written records are available, we can judge the impact of historical events on the society by their effects on pottery, as in ancient Greece (e.g., Cook 1960:261-270, 251: The technical decline of the fourth century... ). A change drastic enough to divorce meanings from their traditional forms may be expected to show up in a pottery sequence. Traditions of form can be traced by constructing chronological sequences of forms in pottery, or in another art or craft, which show no change or for which gradual uninterrupted change can be demonstrated. The use or meaning can be verbalized confidently only when received verbally, translated from the material or pictorial form by a member of the culture which used the form or symbol. The writings of Bernardino de Sahagun (1950) mark the beginning phase of such records in the Americas, coinciding with the extinction of the American styles and the destruction of American monuments. Antonio Guzman s description of Desana symbolism is a useful recent example (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1968). Perhaps a convincing tradition of content could be built in Central Mexico extending from Sahagun to the recent studies of Mercedes Olivera de Vazquez (1969), and perhaps in Yucatan and in ii few regions in the Andean highlands. The evidence we have covering this 400 year period suggests remarkable stability, at least in general themes, and widespread verbal styles which share elements of content (e.g., L&i-Strauss 1969). When the symbols cannot be linked reasonably to a verbal explanation surviving in historical documents or obtained by ethnology, some other method must be used to organize and describe them. The configurational method fills this need. Students of ancient Mexico, which is especially rich in ethnographic sources, have been among the most ardent practitioners of the ethnological method. Kubler s response has been to point out that forms and meanings which are joined during one period may disjoin in another, and that the more remote symbolic systems would be better studied by a method that is independent of verbal records made much later or by people culturally unrelated. He has sharpened the distinction between tradition and style in order to work entirely within the expression of an ancient culture, without the constant comparison back and forth in time required by the ethnological method. A style is thus defined as a synchronic unit, which is to say that changes in it will be regarded as negligible until a new style is defined. The cluster of traditions, of material, use, design and technique, and meaning, which make up the style of the object are of various ages and have various histories, but the period during which they are united is regarded as a style period, meaning that for the purposes of analysis time may be ignored. If one can obtain a full catalogue of the imagery of an ancient culture, one may be able to decode some of its meanings or describe its organization. In his study of Teotihuacan imagery, Kubler, in the absence of written records, examined each form for its grammatical function, whether noun, adjective, or verb, and interpreted the art as a form of picture writing (Kubler 1967:5ff). The relationships of the forms in this linguistic model are self-evident signs and the statement of their functional relationships is objective. A subjective element enters into the naming of the forms and the assignment of significance, such as that of cult objects to isolated nominative compounds (Kubler 1967: 6-7). Naming subjects must always be regarded as an exercise in creativity, but a plausible guess is so much more useful than such cautious designations as Motif A that I think the risk is better taken. Rain

852 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [77,1975 God set down beside Maize Plant gives rise to considerations which will never be aroused by Motif A with Motif B. The configurational method has been useful in the description of the imagery found at the site of Pashash in the Peruvian Andes. Stone reliefs and tenoned heads in collections, but assignable to the site, provided a set of symbolic images for which no cultural context was known. Excavations produced Recuay ceramics bearing the same symbols and added more images. The excavations showed that Pashash was abandoned by about the eighth century, and no reasonable connection could be made with any historically known culture. But by laying out all of the symbols and studying their relationships some things can be learned. For example, a hierarchy from complex to simple images can be seen, with the simple designs appearing as subsidiary parts or attributes of the complex ones. Among the conclusions that one can draw from this hierarchy is that feline images rank below those of frontal crowned men. It would be reassuring to be able to infer the ancient myths that seem to be represented, but the method does not permit conclusions in narrative form. The configurational method has been a useful way to start the study of Pashash imagery, and it is still possible to dismember the style into its elements and trace each one in time. The catalogue of images is useful for making comparisons which have shown how little of Chavin symbolism was retained at Pashash and how much was shared with the later Chimu. With ethnography and historical documentation available for the Chimu, there arises the possibility of applying ethnological analogy to the interpretation of Pashash symbolism. How valid would it be to stretch Chimu accounts 900 years back in time and across a cultural barrier to aid in the explanation of Pashash symbols? Kubler s Teotihuacan study concentrates on style and disregards time, except to deny that forms may be assumed to retain their early meanings in much later times (Kubler 1967:12). Recent studies by Doris Heyden (1975) on the meanings of fire and water symbols in Central Mexico confirm Kubler s argument that designs change in meaning, and especially in the secondary extensions of meaning, over time and over cultural and class barriers. But some forms can be found in Central Mexican imagery which have retained their basic meanings throughout several periods, for example, the goggle-eyes found in Central Mexican art from Teotihuacan through Aztec times. Kubler (1967:6) refers to the goggle-eyes as having to do with the raingod at Teotihuacan, judging by the associated forms. He thus associated the form with a meaning. In Aztec art we are again presented with goggle-eyes on the rain god, the identification depending mainly on imagery in the Codex Borbonicus and the descriptions of Sahagun (1950:I, Ch. IV; 11, Ch. XXV). Despite abundant evidence of social disruption during this long interval, the form and its basic meaning appear to have remained joined. Whether we refw to the rain god by an Aztec name or call him raingod in English is not significant, for the meaning remains the same. To generalize from this case would be unjustified, but to insist upon discontinuity rather than continuity in old American traditions weights the argument against the evidence. Neither disjunction nor continuity can be safely assumed. On the other hand, there are good reasons to believe that the principle of disjunction can help us reconstruct ancient symbolic meanings. The Paez Indians of Colomhia have myths that contain elements which remind one of forms in the ancient sculpture of nearby San Agustin (Bernal Villa 1953; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1972, esp. p. 152, note 15 for bibliography). The configurational school reminds us that the similarities are merely intriguing and that the, perhaps, millenium and a half between the two manifestations is replete with disjunctions of which we have only the beginnings of an archaeological record. The ethnological school argues that archaeology can discover evidence of the circumstances which produced disjunctions and, moreover, that several factors suggest that some parts of the myths reflect traditions which may be as old as San Agustin or older. The similarity of Paez myths to those of surrounding peoples and to myths which are reported from distant

Grieder] INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT SYMBOLS 853 regions suggests that the common elements are old traditions. Christian elements in Paez mythology are easily accounted for by one well-understood foreign contact which produced disjunctions. Where Christian elements can be identified, they give a rough measure of the amount of new material absorbed during 400 years of Christian contact. Quantification of old and new elements is beyond this writer s statistical skill, but the obviously Christian or recent elements appear in far less than half of the recorded material. If 400 years of Christian contact have caused so little change, it is easy to believe that there are elements in the myths which are a thousand years old. Moreover, earlier disjunctions were more likely to have been produced by contact with people of American origin who shared a measure of mythology with the ancestors of the Paez. These considerations, along with the relative isolation of the region and the general evidence of the stability of American traditions, suggest that Paez myths can be used for speculation about the meanings of San Agustin sculptural forms. Proof beyond reasonable doubt will elude us forever, but speculative cases can be made and it is the business of the cultural historian to make them. The phenomenon of disjunction helps explain the current situation in which we have Paez myths as the end of a tradition of content, without sculptural form, and San Agustin monuments for which the conventional symbolism has been lost. Disjunction of meaning from form is what one would expect from the historical and archaeological records. The introduction of Christianity made material expression of traditional ideas dangerous at the same time that control of land and labor passed out of Paez hands. The myths at least give verbal expression to ideas, some of which may preserve the traditions of the ancient sculptors or of people with a comparable cultural tradition. A cultural history of the region awaits description by archaeology and configurational analysis of the styles and traditions of its material culture during the long period between San Agustin and the Spanish Conquest. The permutations of forms and their meanings can be traced only by giving attention to both style and tradition. An understanding of the relationships of forms within a style is indispensable to their description; the configurational method is an attempt to formulate ways of describing these internal relationships. Although the analysis of a style, independent of time, is the first step, the history of a culture requires a description of its relationships to other cultures in which particular traditions of form are traced through time. Except for naming, these descriptions are objective, but verbal narrative is still lacking. Analogy is the method by which verbal narrative traditons may be brought to bear on ancient forms. The modesty of the claim for analogy is worth pointing out: it merely states a comparison. Usually the observer has a narrative tradition for which he can only imagine a possible material form, and a set of ancient symbols in material form for which he can only imagine a possible narrative. The coincidence of the imagined form with the extant one, or the imagined narrative with the preserved one, is the basis of comparison. The onus rests on the observer to show that more than mere comparison is valid. But the analogist can take courage from the fact that the extinction of one tradition does not imply the extinction of other traditions, each of which depends upon particular circumstances. Disjunction is a useful concept because it identifies a cultural phenomenon, but rather than denying us access to ancient meanings, it clarifies the method by which they may be studied. Disjunction is the result of particular social or environmental events or circumstances which can be determined by archaeology and history. Realistic expectations for the recovery and interpretation of ancient cultures must lie somewhere between the total cultural context required by Proskouriakoff (1950: 182) for understanding of the development of art, and the purely pictorial materials on which Kubler pins his hopes. We can scarcely define the total cultural context of a living person, yet we can define the major styles and traditions in which he participates. With a full catalogue of images, with the archaeological record, including ceramics, with an awareness of evidence of

854 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [ 77,1975 disjunction, and with historical and ethnographic records to provide one end of the traditions of content, we can attain reasonably good descriptions of the more recent prehistoric cultures, and at least increase the evidential base for speculation about the remote ones. NOTE I am grateful lo George Kubler for his helpful comments on a draft of this paper. REFERENCES CITED Bernal Villa, Segundo 1953 Aspectos de la cultura Paez: mitologia y cuentos de la Parcialidad de Calderas, Tierradentro. Revista Colombiana de Antropologia 1 : 279-309. Coe, William R. 1965 Tikal: Ten Years of Study of a Maya Ruin in the Lowlands of Guatemala. Expedition 8: 5-56. Cook, Robert Manuel 1960 Greek Painted Pottery. London: Methuen. Furst, Peter T. 1968 The Olmec Were-Jaguar Motif in the Light of Ethnographic Reality. In Dumbarton Oaks Conference on the Olmec. E. P. Benson, Ed. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. pp. 143-174. Gifford, James C. 1965 Ceramics. In Prehistoric Maya Settlements in the Belize Valley. G. R. Willey, W. R. Bullard, Jr., J. B. Glass, and J. C. Gifford, eds. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 54. Heyden, Doris 1975 Water and Fire Symbols in Mexican Manuscripts. Paper presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Dallas, May 8. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1948 Anthropology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Kubler, George 1962 The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1967 The Iconography of the Art of Teotihuacan. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 4. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. 1970 Period, Style and Meaning in Ancient American Art. New Literary History 1:127-144. LCvi-Strauss, Claude 1969 The Raw and the Cooked. J. Weightman and D. Weightman, Trans. New York: Harper and Row. Olivera de Vazquez, Mercedes 1969 Los duenos del agua en Tlaxcalancingo. Boletin del Inslituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia 33:45-48. Panofsky, Eiwin- 1960 Renaissance and Renascenses in Western Art. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell. Proskouriakoff. Tatiana 1950 A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication 593. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerard0 1968 Desana; simbolismo de 10s indios Tukano de Vaupbs. Bogota: Universidad de 10s Andes. 1972 San Agustin: A Culture of Colombia. New York: Praeger. Sahagiin, Bernariino de 1950 General History of the Things of New Spain, Vols. 1-13 (Florentine Codex). A. J. 0. Anderson and C. E. Dibble, Trans. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and University of Utah.

Grieder] INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT SYMBOLS 855 Shaw, Thurstan 1970 Igbo-Ukwu: An Account of Archaeological Discoveries in Eastern Nigeria, Vols. 1-2, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Vansina, Jan 1965 Oral Tradition. H. M. Wright, Trans. Chicago: Aldine. Vogt, Evon Z. 1969 Zinacantan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.