Fearful symmetry

Signs of Mission: Material Semeiosis and Nineteenth-Century Tswana Architecture

“…In many ways, the Comaroffs' early dialectical account of how signs and practices were folded into one another was a precursor of the current anthropological interest in materiality, which takes as its focus the mediations between people and the material world in an effort to complicate any easy divide between signs and objects ðe.g., Graves-Brown 2000;Miller 2005;Knappett and Malafouris 2008Þ. The Comaroffs' narratives of colonial encounters in southern Africa were among the first to fully explore the imbricated nature of signs and practices.…”

Paleolithic aesthetics: Collecting colorful flint pebbles at Middle Pleistocene Qesem Cave, Israel

“…It was suggested that stone tools can also attest to the aesthetic and symbolic conventions of past human societies (Brumm 2010;Duff et al 1992;Graves-Brown 1995). Stones have sensory qualities, including aesthetic and acoustic ones, but many prehistoric activities that involved these qualities do not leave physical traces (Boivin et al 2007).…”

“…Quarrying and knapping activities generate sounds, and features like texture, hardness, shimmer, color, fracture, and susceptibility to polish are inseparable characteristics of stones which cannot be ignored. The remoteness of time tends to preclude consideration of the sensory aspects, and therefore lithic studies are mostly conceived in techno-typological terms, creating a most probably mistaken distinction between objects and their meanings (Taçon 1991;Graves-Brown 1995). Yet, some scholars argue that aesthetics are expressed through various (if not all) aspects of human culture, including technology (Duff et al 1992 Gage 1999).…”

“…As regards to technology, it might be problematic to separate the coincidental from the intentional in terms of form and color. However, a growing body of archaeological evidence, some presented below, suggests that the aesthetic aspects are inseparable from other cultural elements, including technology (Graves -Brown 1995), and should be examined when investigating prehistoric humans' aesthetic conventions. A number of scholars have argued that LP hominins had specifically selected certain rock types from a range of suitable raw materials in order to produce stone tools (e.g., Belfer-Cohen & Goren-Inbar 1994), sometimes choosing by color, texture or brightness.…”

“…It has been argued that LP artefacts, mainly bifaces, often exhibit patterns of symmetry that are not dictated solely by technological considerations (functionality or material constraints) (Gowlett 2011;Kohn & Mithen 1999;Mithen 2003;Wenban-Smith 2004;Wynn 1995). Handaxes might be viewed as products of socially constructed choices between valid functional alternatives (Graves- Brown 1995).…”