This is a beautiful book, filled with stunning color illustrations and illuminating ideas that will open eyes and minds for archaeologists of all stripes. Color is not just another property of a material, and it is certainly not just something that comes out of a bottle. Color evokes whole realms of meanings (the plural is important) and new research questions. Having read this book, I will never again take color for granted.
Marit K. Munson sets the stage with three chapters about the nature of color, Puebloan conceptions of colors, and pigments and paints in the archaeological record. Four chapters then examine color in pottery (Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Jill Neitzel), wall painting (Polly Schaafsma), rock art (Schaafsma), and jewelry (Neitzel and David Witt). The conclusions (Munson and Hays-Gilpin) synthesize the results across time and space. The volume is very well integrated, with Munson's chapters setting the stage and those following building on them.
Chapter 2 introduces the idea of color as a chromatic prayer. Color is an organizing principle of the Puebloan universe, variously linked to the directions and many plants and animals. With color, Pueblo peoples evoke the powers associated with those colors, including rain-bringing katsinas. The chapters that follow do not mention chromatic prayer explicitly, but they do provide examples implicitly. For example, the yellow color of Hopi Sikyatki Polychrome pottery, as well as its images of birds and katsinas, evoke clouds and good harvests (Chapter 4). In murals (Chapter 5), white and also black evoke clouds and storm clouds.
The many colors—yellow, white, black, and others—of clouds and rain illustrate one of the most important points of the volume: “Colors are neither codes to be broken nor a language to be translated and read like a book. Color is one expressive part of a rich symbolic world” full of metaphors and linkages that build and maintain relationships among human and spirit, animal and plant, past and future (p. 25). For example, Chapter 6 explores how the blue-green colors of turquoise are linked to sacred directions, the sky, clouds, and various plants and animals. Furthermore, underground sources of turquoise may have connotations of the underworld from which ancestors emerged, and black-on-white hachure on pottery (Chapter 4) may also represent blue-green.
Descriptions of the way colors are created enhanced my appreciation for colorful materials. Making and applying paints and pigments was often a laborious, meaning-charged, and potentially dangerous process. Some paints were made or applied with human saliva created by chewing specific substances such as squash seeds, and some paint materials were obtained from sacred places on the landscape.
The chapters provide a detailed overview of color—paints and pigments as well as colored materials—found in Ancestral Pueblo archaeology, and they discuss archaeological approaches to those materials. Readers will come away with a new appreciation for the complexities of color, never again tossing all crumbly reddish rocks into the “ochre” bag or relying on simple Munsell readings. We will come to realize that in a colorful universe, matte black made from corn smut is very different from matte black made from charcoal.
The chapters accomplish three goals. They describe the use of color and the distribution of colorful objects and art over time and space. Where possible, they explain how colors were created. They also investigate the possible symbolic and metaphorical meanings of the materials and especially the colors, drawing mostly on ethnographic accounts and contemporary Puebloan ideas. There is little explicit discussion of theory other than a consideration in Chapter 6 of animism and artifact life-history. Also, for the most part, they touch on but do not focus on the social realm. For example, there was a tremendous florescence in the use of color and polychrome in the post-migration, post–AD 1300 Southwest, which the authors suggest (especially in Chapter 5) was linked to the reorganization of Pueblo society at that time, but they do not take it much farther. I say this not as a criticism but rather to suggest that there is much more to be done, inspired by and building on this excellent work.
One small but confusing issue is that many chapters refer to “plates,” even though there are no plates. All figures are integrated into the text.
Color in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest is scholarly. Professionals will find it thorough and well referenced. At the same time, it should also appeal to the educated, interested public because of its subject matter and because it is so clearly written and presented. And because it is so colorful.
