People often imbue their surroundings, including tools, with a “life essence” that makes them active objects. A growing number of archaeologists are beginning to study how such “living” beings impact human behavior. These archaeologists use the term “object agency,” but employ many different ontologicai approaches. We explore this variation, and present a framework comparing different ontologicai models archaeologists use. We adopt an animistic perspective, and evaluate its applicability to the Southwest using ethnographic and archaeological data. We further propose that it is applicable throughout the New World. Puebloan potters consider pots living beings with a spiritual essence that is affected by and that impacts humans. Pottery manufacture is a mutual negotiation between the potter and the clay to create a “Made Being” with its own spiritual and material aspects. We conclude that a similar ontology is reflected in effigy pots and globular jars from the Casas Grandes region. Ultimately we conclude that this perspective provides useful insights into the placement, decoration, and discard of many vessels that have puzzled Southwestern archaeologists for decades.

Since the publication 0fJ.J. Brody's 1971 Indian Painters and White Patrons, a pioneering study on the rise of twentieth-century Native American painting, critical perspectives on the origins of this movement have focused almost exclusively on evaluating the primitivist beliefs of its patrons and their impact on works created in the Studio or Traditional style. With some important exceptions discussed below, elements of the subjectivity that the young Native American artists who originated this movement brought to their compositions remain beyond the breadth of these discussions, acknowledged principally through scattered observations. While the literature that has followed Brody's work has provided this area of study with an increasingly satisfying level of theoretical and contextual richness, an immersion in its discourses leaves the reader conscious of a great unspoken divide that separates those elements of causation arid intentionality that they do and do not address. Aspects of the content, style, and even the medium of the watercolor paintings produced by Native painters in New Mexico and Oklahoma during the early twentieth century are rarely addressed with regard to the indigenous perspectives of the artists themselves. Instead, within a variety of analytical frameworks they are viewed as responses to their engagement with an assortment of well-intended but controlling patrons and promoters, including Indian Service teachers, anthropologists, and the prominent artistic and literary figures of the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies. While approaches that emphasize the importance of this relation offer valid paradigms for interpretation, the resulting picture is one-sided, implicitly suggesting that the characteristics of this art were solely determined by the nature of those interactions. Conspicuously missing is an exploration of reflexivity as it

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