The Soul of Archaeology

Hall, Robert L. 1997. An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.

Until about five years after I got my Master's degree, I couldn't tell people I was an archaeologist; well, not with a straight face. The reason I was shy about admitting my profession was the same reason I was drawn to the field: its eclecticism. To be a good archaeologist, you need to understand the rudiments of biology, chemistry, agronomy, politics, ethnology, physics---indeed, you need to know a little bit about everything that people do or have ever done. A great archaeologist can put all the pieces together into a coherent story---because, finally, that's what we are. Story tellers.

An archaeologist who early understood the beauty and power of combined stories is Robert Hall, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an anthropologist of Native American descent. In his 1997 book, An Archaeology of the Soul, Hall takes a wide-focus, or perhaps it could be better said as a deep-focus, on archaeology in the Americas. Bringing together images and cosmology from cultures as seemingly unbridgeable as the Aztec of Mexico and the Pawnee of the Great Plains, Hall opens the reader’s mind to an infinity of hitherto unconsidered connections.

Drawing from both ethnographies of the past and oral history of the present, Hall provides the reader with the depth of field only obtained from years of research and contemplation of the intricacies of human culture. One example that ranges in time from 11,000 BP to 500 AD, and in space from South America to the Arctic, is described in a chapter entitled, "Atlatls, Courting Flutes, and Calumets." An atlatl is the Nahuatl (Aztec language) word for spear-thrower. An accurate and powerful hunting tool, the atlatl was used originally to hunt mammoth elephant, and later buffalo. Oral history of Native Americans north of Mexico do not contain references to the atlatl, which was effectively replaced there by the bow and arrow about 1500 years ago. But, according to Hall, shapes, meanings, and context of the atlatl can be seen in the calumet ceremonies and iconography of the Plains Indians.

In other essays, Hall discusses the cross-cultural ritual importance of the sweat bath, long-nosed gods and the Red Horn myth, contraries, and rituals honoring the dead. In one essay that drew my attention as an ex-English major, Hall uses Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology to illustrate the dilemma behind Illinois' Dickson Mounds museum. These are breath-taking analogies, not simply for their shock value on first reading, but because they reveal themselves as appropriate on reconsideration.

You can’t believe it all. But the reader walks away from the book, or from Hall’s lectures, refreshed and stimulated by the possibilities. Written without the jargon prevalent in many archaeological texts, An Archaeology of the Soul is quite accessible to the interested amateur, and a resource of value to any archaeologist interested in the connection between material culture and the power of ritual.