© 2009 International Institute of Anthropology
© 2009 Reports of Prehistoric Research Projects
© 2009 The authors
© 2009 Lolita Nikolova
© 2009 Ernst Pernicka
© 2009 Reports of Prehistoric Research Projects
© 2009 The authors
© 2009 Lolita Nikolova
© 2009 Ernst Pernicka
| Approach to Enculturation in Prehistory and in Present 60th Birth Anniversary of Ian Hodder Complied and edited by Lolita Nikolova and Ernst Pernicka Reports of Prehistoric Research Projects 9 (2009) in collaboration with Stratum, Chisinau, Moldova Contents |
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Kinship studies, Symbolic Thought, and Prehistory in the 21st Century
Anthropology
Bojka Milicic, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah
ABSTRACT
Recent advances in linguistics, primatology, and cultural and cognitive anthropology have brought the study of kinship back into
focus. This paper suggests that the house as material culture is the depository of meanings about kinship and social organization of
distant human past. Since the symbolic thought is necessary to produce kinship categories, the house can also provide valuable
insights into human cognition in the past.
Pierre Bourdieu (1977) formulated the concept of habitus as a “generative principle”. The cognitive and motivating structures make
up the habitus through the dialectical relationship between the general social conditions and the particular state of the structure in
which habitus is practiced (1977:78). The practices are filtered by the objective conditions and mediated by individual agency.
Habitus encodes a range of social meanings and practices in one of its physical manifestations, the house. Bourdieu’s habitus and
the house figure prominently in Ian Hodder's work. For Hodder (2003) material culture is action and practice. One area of action
and practice that is closely related to and encoded in the residential space is the area of kinship organization. Kinship has
behavioral, material, as well as cognitive aspects.
Bourdieu defined kinship relations as structural principles of the social world, which always as such fulfill political functions with
matrimonial strategies as necessary forces of social reproduction (1977:41). Kinship in ethnographic societies is intermeshed with
not only politics, but also the economic system in terms of division of labor, the often-corporate nature of kin groups, as well as
feasting and exchanges. In ethnographically described societies these behaviors are manifested in the material culture.
In this paper I will examine how the recent advances in kinship studies can offer valuable insights into social organization and
cognition in the distant human past. The house as a home in ethnographic societies is an icon, index, symbol, metaphor, and
metonym standing for kin groups and as such it is a fundamental link between the material culture and kinship and social
organization. If the same was true for ancient societies, a quite plausible scenario, than the house can also be a depository of
information on human cognition involved in the production of symbols and metaphors.
Kinship organization and kinship terminologies are an area of human life that should be of fundamental interest to a wide range of
research, from cultural anthropologists to cognitive scientists and language acquisition specialists to evolutionary psychologists,
linguists, and archaeologists. Its properties make kinship terminology a powerful tool for studying human cognition, prehistory, and
social organization, and a number of researchers have recently taken up the challenge. Recently kinship and kinship terminologies
have brought together several disciplines: cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, historical linguistics, cognitive
anthropology, and evolutionary ecology (Allen et al. 2008, Chapais 2008, Jones and Milicic, in preparation). Such a synthesis is
much needed in a century that threatens to dissolve classic foundations of anthropology and disconnect many sub-disciplines from
its fractured core.
Gowlett (2008) points out that there is a substantial evidence of the past socio-cultural behavior in the archaeological record, yet at
the same time there is a woeful absence of kinship from its books that “simply do not have chapters with titles like ‘Kinship and
marriage’ (2008: 41). Gamble (2008) sums up the status of kinship in archaeology with this observation: “…the closest archeologist
are likely to get is through investigating concepts such as family and household, summed up, for example, in Hodder’s invocation of
domus and asking where in the Neolithic the house, hearth, and pot became material metaphors of the domestication of society”
(2008:30). Gamble explicitly states that the great human diaspora of some 60,000 years ago was made possible not only by new
technologies, but also by an expansion of social networks that implied cognitive means of categorizing the social world, kin and
affines in particular, as well as their metaphorical extensions. “Kinship was never only genetic or linguistic property, but also material”
(ibid. 32), therefore archaeologists not only need to decode its symbolic representations in the material culture and assess its role in
the social organization in the past, but also can use these findings to hypothesize about the architecture of human mind that made all
of this possible.
There has been a considerable body of research in cultural anthropology since Lévi-Strauss (1979, 1984) proposed the concept of
‘sociétés a maison’ or “house societies’. The ‘house societies’, as defined by Lévi-Strauss, lack firm rules of descent and marriage
and instead concentrate on the ‘house’ which does not refer only to the physical structure and its current occupants, but also to its
past inhabitants, their allies and sometime clients, who controlled material and immaterial property (1984:190). The house is often
associated with a specific name, and it becomes an index of social relations and of moral standing in the society (Rogers 1991,
Milicic 1992, 1998). Thus the house is both a physical entity and a cultural and moral category. It is the focus of family and
community life where the household carries on its biological and social reproduction and serves as a depository of objects that
contain symbolic meanings associated with the succession of generations and their social relations.
The mathematician and logician G. S. Pierce (Buchler, 1940) distinguished three categories of signs: anything that is related to a
second thing, its object, in respect to a quality: icons that are connected to an object on the basis of similarity in appearance or its
internal organization. For example, a picture of a house if just that, while a map is an icon of organization of a segment of space. An
index is a sign that refers to the object it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object. For example, in recent studies of
community size, brain size, and communication, it is proposed that the group size is an index of cognitive abilities in primates (Dunbar
2001, Gamble 2008). Symbol is a kind of sign that refers to an object that it denotes by a conventional code. The same sign can be
interpreted as an icon, an index, and a symbol. For example, certain Polynesian tattoo designs are icons of house beams, but they
are also indices of subjugation to the level of suffering while receiving the tattoo, as well as symbols of gender and political relations
(Gell 1993, Hage, Harary and Milicic 1996). The ability to interpret the same sign as an icon, index, and symbol, as well as to create
new symbols and relationship between symbols, is a distinctive property of human cognition and symbolic reference that allows
displacement in space and time (Deacon 1997).
Houses are often metaphorically connected to both, the human body and the cosmic body (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995 Fox
1993). The production of metaphors is a fundamental property of modern human mind, an index of human cognition. Lévi-Strauss
(1966) argued that the use of metaphor is seminal in the ‘science of the concrete’ where the process of classification is necessary to
organize the world and, we might add, to survive in it. Totemism (Lévi-Strauss 1963) is a case in point where the relationships
between social groups or categories are conceptualized as the relationship between categories in nature.
Metaphor as a cognitive operation has been hailed as “our brain’s greatest talent”
(Barber and Barber 2006). Metaphors are structurally related to analogical thinking: we use metaphors to express less familiar or
difficult concepts in terms of a more familiar one. Lakoff and Johnson (198o) distinguish spatialization-orientation metaphors that are
grounded in our physical experience as mammals, and culturally grounded metaphors. They point out that without metaphors not
only whole areas of culture would not be possible, such as religion and art, but also our everyday experience is to a large extent
structured by metaphors. The spatial orientation metaphors were explored in interpretive archaeology, for example in burial
arrangements of body parts (Shanks and Tilley 1982). It is well know that kinship metaphors abound in many if not all cultures.
Metaphorical extension of kinship terms, such as fictive or ritual kinship, ethnicity, membership in a religious congregation, etc., widen
social networks beyond kinship. Kinship metaphors are often materialized in the use of motifs such as vines, branches, and other
plant metaphors that are spread across cultures (Fox 1971, Milicic 1992, 1996, Gell 1993).
Culturally grounded metaphors require an understanding of the social convention. For example, among the Ndembu, an African
society, three colors, black, white, and red, contain everything important for the Ndembu culture (Turner 1967). The three colors are
better understood as a four-group model because of the Ndembu understanding of color red as ambiguous (Milicic 1989). The four
values denote several levels of meanings: the level of folk physiology expressed through the types of food, bodily fluids, and notions
of paternity and maternity, the level of social relations between friends and enemies expressed though believes in witchcraft, and the
level of kinship. The conflict between matrilineal descent and virilocal residence and competition for control of children. The three
levels are constructed as metaphors of each other. Metonyms are also used in relations to the house. For example, in Austronesian
societies most houses possess a “ritual attractor’ that is a metonym of the house itself (Fox 1993:31).
Gamble argues that in archaeology the use of material culture can be looked at in terms of metaphors. Specifically, following Lakoff
and Johnson (1980), the use of various forms of containers can be decoded as metaphors of kinship categories based on the
experience of the body as container (Gamble 2008:38). Allen’s (1982, 1986, 2008) tetradic model of kinship that describes the
simplest possible social organization based on the four kinship categories also states that the kin categories did not necessarily
depend on linguistic categories, but the kin groups could have been symbolically marked, by colors for example, when participating in
the “dance of relatives’, an ‘effervescent’ ritual occasion (Durkheim 1915) that brought the community together for the purpose of
social and cultural reproduction. The question here is whether this level of symbolic thinking was possible without fully developed
language. Steven Mithen (1997) has used an architectural metaphor, the cathedral, to illustrate his view of the cognitive
breakthrough that enabled human thought to transcend the four previously separated “chapels”, or types of intelligence: social,
natural, technical, and linguistic. The ‘vandalization’ of the ‘walls’ between the ‘chapels’ was made possible by language, that is by
symbolic thought. The very breach of the ‘walls’ that separated the ‘chapels’ or cognitive modules enabled the production of
metaphors and analogical thinking.
Gamble suggests that Allen’s original tetradically organized society can be understood primarily as a material metaphor of a
container with four compartments (2008:34). In ethnographically described societies there are many examples of the dual and
tetradic organization of space and its counterparts in other forms of material culture sometimes accompanied by kinship and social
organization. For example, the Inca Empire was administratively divided into four suyus or quarters (Zuidema 1990) and this
quadripartite structure is still reflected today in the organization of many towns and villages throughout the Andean region. The
same quadripartite division is reflected in weaving as well, and there are strong indications that the Inca khipu was based on a binary
code (Urton 2002, 2003). A reconstruction of ancient Andean patterns of marriage are needed to se if this quadripartite structures
correspond to kinship organization. Hage (2003) has reconstructed proto-Mayan kinship and marriage as a four-section Kariera
kinship system for Proto- and archaic Maya society. The Maya developed an elaborate cosmological scheme in which the four
cardinal directions were associated with colors, gods, celestial and metaphysical concepts similar to the cosmology of the Aztecs.
Hage showed that the cosmology was isomorphic to the quadripartite Maya kinship system.
Calvin and Bickerton (2000) placed the emergence of complex thought at some 50,000 years ago, marked by long-term planning,
logical train of reference, games with made-up rules, and the discovery of hidden patterns. Almost forty years earlier Lévi-Strauss
(1965) noticed that in ethnographically described societies kinship calculus requires remarkable cognitive abilities and that it
contains all of the characteristics enumerated much later by Calvin and Bickerton. In his discussion of co-evolution of language and
kinship, Barnard (2008) coupled Calvin and Bickerton’s (2000) model of the three revolutions in language with the three stages of
kinship organization. The first was the ‘signifying revolution’ marked by proto-language and proto-kinship and associated with Homo
habilis and Homo erectus; the second was ‘syntactic revolution’ and rudimentary kinship associated with archaic Homo sapiens, and
the third, symbolic revolution, was marked by true language and true kinship, associated with Homo sapiens sapiens. The third
revolution implies the full capacity of the expression of metaphor and symbolism. That, in turn, coexisted with universal kinship
categorization, explicit rules of sharing, as well as the full range of kin behavior such as exchanges and sharing (Barnard: 2008:
235).
Kinship is still a significant factor in many contemporary societies and certainly was the basis of early human social organization.
Indeed, it was the hallmark of humanity, as argued by Lévi-Strauss. In the recent volume “Primeval kinship” primatologist Bernard
Chapais (2008) reconciles the evolutionary perspective and the structuralist theory of human kinship proposed by Lévi-Strauss,
arguing convincingly for the structural unity of human kinship organization. He makes the case for the integration of the ahistorical
structuralist view and the diachronic reconstruction of the emergence of proto-human kinship organization as a necessary condition
for the functioning of human society. Kinship terminology could have been the decisive step that distinguished the non-human
primate societies form the proto-human social organization. Kinship terminology allowed the planning of alliances in advance with the
use of symbolic reference and displacement that is the hallmark of human language (Deacon 1997). Kinship calculus required
symbolic reference and the ability to classify relatives into categories that required analogical thinking, a product of the modern mind.
Many linguists undertake lexical reconstructions that symbolically recreate the social and material world of ancient cultures. What
have we learned from linguistic reconstructions of kinship terms? Drawing on the phonetic, semantic, evolutionary, and behavioural
arguments and the cognates they reconstructed for a large sample of world languages, Bancel et al. (Bancel and Mathey de L’Etang
(2002, 2002a, 2005, 2006; Bancel, Mathey de L’Etang, and Ruhlen, in preparation, Bancel, Mathey de ‘L’Etang and Bengtson, in
preparation) argue that kinship terms mama and papa represent the oldest preserved words from the human proto-languages and
might be the origin of language itself. The consistent meanings of cognates on the global level can be explained by common
inheritance from Proto-sapiens language predating the initial dispersion of modern humans, between 50,000 and 200,000 YBP.
Bancel et al. support this bold claim with the recent archeological and genetic findings pointing to the southern African origin of
anatomically and behaviorally modern Homo sapiens.
Christopher Ehret’s (2008; in preparation) takes up the reconstruction of kinship terminology of the three African proto-language
reaching to about 15,000 years ago. The linguistically reconstructed lexicons of the four recognized African language families—
Afroasiatic (Afrasian), Nilo-Saharan, Niger Kordofanian, and Khoisan, coupled with recent archaeological, and genetic findings, take
us back 15,000-13,700 BP. The kinship terminology of these ancient speakers provides insights into their kinship and social
organization. Ehret’s findings suggest that these ancient systems stressed matrilineal kinship among both Afroasiatic and Nilo-
Saharan speakers. Hage (2006) found linguistic evidence of Dravidian kinship systems in Africa, while another reconstruction of
kinship terms (Hage and Marck 2003) confirms matrilocal residence among the ancient Polynesians, nicely coinciding with
geneticists’ findings (Kaeyser et al. 2006)
The archeological site is not a direct blueprint of social organization, but the reconstructions of kinship systems in prehistoric
societies can provide the behavioral context within which the material culture acquired meaning. It is now up to interpretive, cognitive
and symbolic archeologists to take up the challenge and the wealth of information accumulated in linguistics, primatology, cognitive
studies, and cultural anthropology.
The approach to the material culture in the archaeological record, particularly the residential space, but also the sacred space and
burial practices, informed by these insights about the types of kinship organization reconstructed for past societies, should engender
novel taxonomies of meanings in the archeological record and help to weave together the material culture with the habitus and the
practices that revolved around kinship.
REFERENCES:
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________1986. Tetradic Theory: An approach to kinship. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 17:87-109.
________ 1989. The evolution of Kinship Terminologies. Lingua 77:173-85.
_______2008. Tetradic Theory and the Origin of Human Kinship. In: Allen, N. J., H. Callan, R. Dunbar, and W. James, 2008. Early
Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing
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Blackwell Publishing
Bancel, P. and A. Matthey de L’Etang 2002. Tracing the Ancestral Kinship Systems: Global Etymon KAKA. Part I: A Linguistic Study.
Mother Tongue VII 209-243.
___________ 2005. Kin Tongue. A Study of Kin Nursery Terms in Relation to Language Acquisition, with a Historical and
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___________ 2006. Kin Terms (P)APA, (T)ATA, (M)AMA, (K)AKA and the Origin of Articulate Language. Cognitive Systems 7-1, 79-
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Articulate Language. In: Kinship and Language: Per Hage and the Renaissance of Kinship Studies. Jones, D. and B. Milicic, Eds.
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J., H. Callan, R. Dunbar, and W. James, Eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing
Bourdieu, P., 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. 1977. R. Nice, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Press.
Carsten, J. and S. Hugh-Jones, 1995. About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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University Press.
Dunbar, R. I. M. 2001. “Brains on Two Legs: Group size and the Evolution of Intelligence”. In Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior
can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution. F. B. M. de Waal, Ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Durkheim, E. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. J. W. Swain, trans. London: Cohen and West.
Ehret, C. 2008. Reconstructing Ancient Kinship in Africa. In: Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction, Allen, N. J., H.
Callan, R. Dunbar, and W. James, Eds.
___________ Reconstructing Ancient Kinship: An African Case Study. In: Kinship and Language: Per Hage and the Renaissance of
Kinship Studies. Jones, D. and B. Milicic, Eds.. in preparation.
Fox, J. J. 1971. ‘Sister’s child as a plant: metaphors in an idiom of consanguinity’, in R. Needham, ed., Rethinking Kinship and
Marriage. London: Tavistock.
Fox, J.J. ed., 1993: Inside Austronesian Houses: Perspectives on Domestic Design for Living. Canberra: Research School of the
Comparative Austronesian Studies, ANU.
Gamble, C. 2008. Kinship and Material Culture: Archaeological Implications of the Human Global Diaspora. In: Early Human Kinship:
From Sex to Social Reproduction. Allen, N. J., H. Callan, R. Dunbar, and W. James , Eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing
Gell, A., 1993. Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Sex to Social Reproduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing , Allen, N. J., H. Callan, R. Dunbar, and W. James, Eds.
Hage, P. 2003. The Ancient Maya Kinship System. Journal of Anthropological Research: 5-21.
________2006. Dravidian Kinship system in Africa. L’Homme 177-8:395-408
Hage, P. F. Harary, and B, Milicic, 1996. Tattooing, gender, and social stratification in Micro-Polynesia. Journal of the Royal
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_________ 2003. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, D. and B. Milicic, in preparation. Kinship and Language: Per Hage and the Renaissance of Kinship Studies.
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Origins of Polynesians: mtDNA and Y Chromosome Gradients Across the Pacific. Molecular Biology and Evolution 23(11): 2234-2244
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Lévi-Strauss, C. 1965. The Future of Kinship Studies. Proceedings of the Royal
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__________, 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
___________ 1979. La Voie de Masques, Paris: Plon
___________1984. Paroles Données. Paris: Plon
__________ 1963. Totemism. R. Needham, trans. Boston: Beacon Press.
Milicic, B. 1989. A Group Model of Ndembu Color Symbolism, Semiotica 73 (1-2): 121-132.
_________ 1992. Vine of Kinship, fields of lavender: Kinship, gender, and social stratification in an insular Mediterranean
community. Ph.D. Dissertation. Salt Lake City: University of Utah.
___________ 1998. The Grapevine Forest: Kinship, Status, and Wealth in a Mediterranean Community. In: Kinship, Networks, and
Exchange: New Directions in Kinship Studies, 15-35. T. Schweizer and D. White, Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mithen, S. 1997. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. Thames and Hudson.
Rogers, C. 1991. Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: The Transformation and T. Reproduction of an Aveyronnais Community.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Schweitzer, T. and D. White, Eds: Kinship, Networks, and Exchange: New Directions in Kinship Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Shanks, M. and C. Tilley, 1982. Ideology, Symbolic Power and Ritual Communication: A reinterpretation of Neolithic Mortuary
Practices. In: Symbolic and Structural Archeology. Hodder, I. , ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, V. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Urton, G. 2002. Narrative threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin TX: University of Texas Press.
________2003. Signs of the Inca Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. Austin: U of Texas Press .
Zuidema, T.1990. Inca Civilization in Cuzco. Translated from the French by J.-J. Decoster. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Anthropology
Bojka Milicic, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah
ABSTRACT
Recent advances in linguistics, primatology, and cultural and cognitive anthropology have brought the study of kinship back into
focus. This paper suggests that the house as material culture is the depository of meanings about kinship and social organization of
distant human past. Since the symbolic thought is necessary to produce kinship categories, the house can also provide valuable
insights into human cognition in the past.
Pierre Bourdieu (1977) formulated the concept of habitus as a “generative principle”. The cognitive and motivating structures make
up the habitus through the dialectical relationship between the general social conditions and the particular state of the structure in
which habitus is practiced (1977:78). The practices are filtered by the objective conditions and mediated by individual agency.
Habitus encodes a range of social meanings and practices in one of its physical manifestations, the house. Bourdieu’s habitus and
the house figure prominently in Ian Hodder's work. For Hodder (2003) material culture is action and practice. One area of action
and practice that is closely related to and encoded in the residential space is the area of kinship organization. Kinship has
behavioral, material, as well as cognitive aspects.
Bourdieu defined kinship relations as structural principles of the social world, which always as such fulfill political functions with
matrimonial strategies as necessary forces of social reproduction (1977:41). Kinship in ethnographic societies is intermeshed with
not only politics, but also the economic system in terms of division of labor, the often-corporate nature of kin groups, as well as
feasting and exchanges. In ethnographically described societies these behaviors are manifested in the material culture.
In this paper I will examine how the recent advances in kinship studies can offer valuable insights into social organization and
cognition in the distant human past. The house as a home in ethnographic societies is an icon, index, symbol, metaphor, and
metonym standing for kin groups and as such it is a fundamental link between the material culture and kinship and social
organization. If the same was true for ancient societies, a quite plausible scenario, than the house can also be a depository of
information on human cognition involved in the production of symbols and metaphors.
Kinship organization and kinship terminologies are an area of human life that should be of fundamental interest to a wide range of
research, from cultural anthropologists to cognitive scientists and language acquisition specialists to evolutionary psychologists,
linguists, and archaeologists. Its properties make kinship terminology a powerful tool for studying human cognition, prehistory, and
social organization, and a number of researchers have recently taken up the challenge. Recently kinship and kinship terminologies
have brought together several disciplines: cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, historical linguistics, cognitive
anthropology, and evolutionary ecology (Allen et al. 2008, Chapais 2008, Jones and Milicic, in preparation). Such a synthesis is
much needed in a century that threatens to dissolve classic foundations of anthropology and disconnect many sub-disciplines from
its fractured core.
Gowlett (2008) points out that there is a substantial evidence of the past socio-cultural behavior in the archaeological record, yet at
the same time there is a woeful absence of kinship from its books that “simply do not have chapters with titles like ‘Kinship and
marriage’ (2008: 41). Gamble (2008) sums up the status of kinship in archaeology with this observation: “…the closest archeologist
are likely to get is through investigating concepts such as family and household, summed up, for example, in Hodder’s invocation of
domus and asking where in the Neolithic the house, hearth, and pot became material metaphors of the domestication of society”
(2008:30). Gamble explicitly states that the great human diaspora of some 60,000 years ago was made possible not only by new
technologies, but also by an expansion of social networks that implied cognitive means of categorizing the social world, kin and
affines in particular, as well as their metaphorical extensions. “Kinship was never only genetic or linguistic property, but also material”
(ibid. 32), therefore archaeologists not only need to decode its symbolic representations in the material culture and assess its role in
the social organization in the past, but also can use these findings to hypothesize about the architecture of human mind that made all
of this possible.
There has been a considerable body of research in cultural anthropology since Lévi-Strauss (1979, 1984) proposed the concept of
‘sociétés a maison’ or “house societies’. The ‘house societies’, as defined by Lévi-Strauss, lack firm rules of descent and marriage
and instead concentrate on the ‘house’ which does not refer only to the physical structure and its current occupants, but also to its
past inhabitants, their allies and sometime clients, who controlled material and immaterial property (1984:190). The house is often
associated with a specific name, and it becomes an index of social relations and of moral standing in the society (Rogers 1991,
Milicic 1992, 1998). Thus the house is both a physical entity and a cultural and moral category. It is the focus of family and
community life where the household carries on its biological and social reproduction and serves as a depository of objects that
contain symbolic meanings associated with the succession of generations and their social relations.
The mathematician and logician G. S. Pierce (Buchler, 1940) distinguished three categories of signs: anything that is related to a
second thing, its object, in respect to a quality: icons that are connected to an object on the basis of similarity in appearance or its
internal organization. For example, a picture of a house if just that, while a map is an icon of organization of a segment of space. An
index is a sign that refers to the object it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object. For example, in recent studies of
community size, brain size, and communication, it is proposed that the group size is an index of cognitive abilities in primates (Dunbar
2001, Gamble 2008). Symbol is a kind of sign that refers to an object that it denotes by a conventional code. The same sign can be
interpreted as an icon, an index, and a symbol. For example, certain Polynesian tattoo designs are icons of house beams, but they
are also indices of subjugation to the level of suffering while receiving the tattoo, as well as symbols of gender and political relations
(Gell 1993, Hage, Harary and Milicic 1996). The ability to interpret the same sign as an icon, index, and symbol, as well as to create
new symbols and relationship between symbols, is a distinctive property of human cognition and symbolic reference that allows
displacement in space and time (Deacon 1997).
Houses are often metaphorically connected to both, the human body and the cosmic body (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995 Fox
1993). The production of metaphors is a fundamental property of modern human mind, an index of human cognition. Lévi-Strauss
(1966) argued that the use of metaphor is seminal in the ‘science of the concrete’ where the process of classification is necessary to
organize the world and, we might add, to survive in it. Totemism (Lévi-Strauss 1963) is a case in point where the relationships
between social groups or categories are conceptualized as the relationship between categories in nature.
Metaphor as a cognitive operation has been hailed as “our brain’s greatest talent”
(Barber and Barber 2006). Metaphors are structurally related to analogical thinking: we use metaphors to express less familiar or
difficult concepts in terms of a more familiar one. Lakoff and Johnson (198o) distinguish spatialization-orientation metaphors that are
grounded in our physical experience as mammals, and culturally grounded metaphors. They point out that without metaphors not
only whole areas of culture would not be possible, such as religion and art, but also our everyday experience is to a large extent
structured by metaphors. The spatial orientation metaphors were explored in interpretive archaeology, for example in burial
arrangements of body parts (Shanks and Tilley 1982). It is well know that kinship metaphors abound in many if not all cultures.
Metaphorical extension of kinship terms, such as fictive or ritual kinship, ethnicity, membership in a religious congregation, etc., widen
social networks beyond kinship. Kinship metaphors are often materialized in the use of motifs such as vines, branches, and other
plant metaphors that are spread across cultures (Fox 1971, Milicic 1992, 1996, Gell 1993).
Culturally grounded metaphors require an understanding of the social convention. For example, among the Ndembu, an African
society, three colors, black, white, and red, contain everything important for the Ndembu culture (Turner 1967). The three colors are
better understood as a four-group model because of the Ndembu understanding of color red as ambiguous (Milicic 1989). The four
values denote several levels of meanings: the level of folk physiology expressed through the types of food, bodily fluids, and notions
of paternity and maternity, the level of social relations between friends and enemies expressed though believes in witchcraft, and the
level of kinship. The conflict between matrilineal descent and virilocal residence and competition for control of children. The three
levels are constructed as metaphors of each other. Metonyms are also used in relations to the house. For example, in Austronesian
societies most houses possess a “ritual attractor’ that is a metonym of the house itself (Fox 1993:31).
Gamble argues that in archaeology the use of material culture can be looked at in terms of metaphors. Specifically, following Lakoff
and Johnson (1980), the use of various forms of containers can be decoded as metaphors of kinship categories based on the
experience of the body as container (Gamble 2008:38). Allen’s (1982, 1986, 2008) tetradic model of kinship that describes the
simplest possible social organization based on the four kinship categories also states that the kin categories did not necessarily
depend on linguistic categories, but the kin groups could have been symbolically marked, by colors for example, when participating in
the “dance of relatives’, an ‘effervescent’ ritual occasion (Durkheim 1915) that brought the community together for the purpose of
social and cultural reproduction. The question here is whether this level of symbolic thinking was possible without fully developed
language. Steven Mithen (1997) has used an architectural metaphor, the cathedral, to illustrate his view of the cognitive
breakthrough that enabled human thought to transcend the four previously separated “chapels”, or types of intelligence: social,
natural, technical, and linguistic. The ‘vandalization’ of the ‘walls’ between the ‘chapels’ was made possible by language, that is by
symbolic thought. The very breach of the ‘walls’ that separated the ‘chapels’ or cognitive modules enabled the production of
metaphors and analogical thinking.
Gamble suggests that Allen’s original tetradically organized society can be understood primarily as a material metaphor of a
container with four compartments (2008:34). In ethnographically described societies there are many examples of the dual and
tetradic organization of space and its counterparts in other forms of material culture sometimes accompanied by kinship and social
organization. For example, the Inca Empire was administratively divided into four suyus or quarters (Zuidema 1990) and this
quadripartite structure is still reflected today in the organization of many towns and villages throughout the Andean region. The
same quadripartite division is reflected in weaving as well, and there are strong indications that the Inca khipu was based on a binary
code (Urton 2002, 2003). A reconstruction of ancient Andean patterns of marriage are needed to se if this quadripartite structures
correspond to kinship organization. Hage (2003) has reconstructed proto-Mayan kinship and marriage as a four-section Kariera
kinship system for Proto- and archaic Maya society. The Maya developed an elaborate cosmological scheme in which the four
cardinal directions were associated with colors, gods, celestial and metaphysical concepts similar to the cosmology of the Aztecs.
Hage showed that the cosmology was isomorphic to the quadripartite Maya kinship system.
Calvin and Bickerton (2000) placed the emergence of complex thought at some 50,000 years ago, marked by long-term planning,
logical train of reference, games with made-up rules, and the discovery of hidden patterns. Almost forty years earlier Lévi-Strauss
(1965) noticed that in ethnographically described societies kinship calculus requires remarkable cognitive abilities and that it
contains all of the characteristics enumerated much later by Calvin and Bickerton. In his discussion of co-evolution of language and
kinship, Barnard (2008) coupled Calvin and Bickerton’s (2000) model of the three revolutions in language with the three stages of
kinship organization. The first was the ‘signifying revolution’ marked by proto-language and proto-kinship and associated with Homo
habilis and Homo erectus; the second was ‘syntactic revolution’ and rudimentary kinship associated with archaic Homo sapiens, and
the third, symbolic revolution, was marked by true language and true kinship, associated with Homo sapiens sapiens. The third
revolution implies the full capacity of the expression of metaphor and symbolism. That, in turn, coexisted with universal kinship
categorization, explicit rules of sharing, as well as the full range of kin behavior such as exchanges and sharing (Barnard: 2008:
235).
Kinship is still a significant factor in many contemporary societies and certainly was the basis of early human social organization.
Indeed, it was the hallmark of humanity, as argued by Lévi-Strauss. In the recent volume “Primeval kinship” primatologist Bernard
Chapais (2008) reconciles the evolutionary perspective and the structuralist theory of human kinship proposed by Lévi-Strauss,
arguing convincingly for the structural unity of human kinship organization. He makes the case for the integration of the ahistorical
structuralist view and the diachronic reconstruction of the emergence of proto-human kinship organization as a necessary condition
for the functioning of human society. Kinship terminology could have been the decisive step that distinguished the non-human
primate societies form the proto-human social organization. Kinship terminology allowed the planning of alliances in advance with the
use of symbolic reference and displacement that is the hallmark of human language (Deacon 1997). Kinship calculus required
symbolic reference and the ability to classify relatives into categories that required analogical thinking, a product of the modern mind.
Many linguists undertake lexical reconstructions that symbolically recreate the social and material world of ancient cultures. What
have we learned from linguistic reconstructions of kinship terms? Drawing on the phonetic, semantic, evolutionary, and behavioural
arguments and the cognates they reconstructed for a large sample of world languages, Bancel et al. (Bancel and Mathey de L’Etang
(2002, 2002a, 2005, 2006; Bancel, Mathey de L’Etang, and Ruhlen, in preparation, Bancel, Mathey de ‘L’Etang and Bengtson, in
preparation) argue that kinship terms mama and papa represent the oldest preserved words from the human proto-languages and
might be the origin of language itself. The consistent meanings of cognates on the global level can be explained by common
inheritance from Proto-sapiens language predating the initial dispersion of modern humans, between 50,000 and 200,000 YBP.
Bancel et al. support this bold claim with the recent archeological and genetic findings pointing to the southern African origin of
anatomically and behaviorally modern Homo sapiens.
Christopher Ehret’s (2008; in preparation) takes up the reconstruction of kinship terminology of the three African proto-language
reaching to about 15,000 years ago. The linguistically reconstructed lexicons of the four recognized African language families—
Afroasiatic (Afrasian), Nilo-Saharan, Niger Kordofanian, and Khoisan, coupled with recent archaeological, and genetic findings, take
us back 15,000-13,700 BP. The kinship terminology of these ancient speakers provides insights into their kinship and social
organization. Ehret’s findings suggest that these ancient systems stressed matrilineal kinship among both Afroasiatic and Nilo-
Saharan speakers. Hage (2006) found linguistic evidence of Dravidian kinship systems in Africa, while another reconstruction of
kinship terms (Hage and Marck 2003) confirms matrilocal residence among the ancient Polynesians, nicely coinciding with
geneticists’ findings (Kaeyser et al. 2006)
The archeological site is not a direct blueprint of social organization, but the reconstructions of kinship systems in prehistoric
societies can provide the behavioral context within which the material culture acquired meaning. It is now up to interpretive, cognitive
and symbolic archeologists to take up the challenge and the wealth of information accumulated in linguistics, primatology, cognitive
studies, and cultural anthropology.
The approach to the material culture in the archaeological record, particularly the residential space, but also the sacred space and
burial practices, informed by these insights about the types of kinship organization reconstructed for past societies, should engender
novel taxonomies of meanings in the archeological record and help to weave together the material culture with the habitus and the
practices that revolved around kinship.
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