Objects and Their Glassy Essence: Semiotics of Self in the Early Bronze Age Black Sea

This article draws upon two concepts deployed by the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in his semiotic writings that have so far received little attention in studies of materiality and agency in archaeology, those of the “Interpretant” and “habit.” The emphasis of both of these concepts on the interpretive side of semiotic functioning suggests that some of the problems with current theories of material agency may be due to their focus on the production of meaning rather than the recursive nature of meaningmaking that requires consideration of the consumption side of meaningful communication acts as well. Using an example of pottery-making practices from the Early Bronze Age Black Sea region, this article argues that we should instead rethink agency as an “archaeology of self” in which identity and meaning of signs—whether words, people, or things—are distributed across and emergent from social networks and communities of interpreters. Something new seems to have been happening in the Black Sea region at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age. Archaeological work over the past two decades has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the region in the millennia before the Greeks established their first colonies there, and the picture that is emerging is one of local communities’ slow but increasing enAs articles go, this one has had a particularly long journey and has benefited from the inspiration and critical insights of a number of people along the way. Thanks are due to John Barrett, for urging me way back in 2008 to go further in my exploration of Peirce’s “Interpretant” for archaeology, as this article may never have been written without his inspiration; to Zoë Crossland for organizing a session on Peirce for the first US Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting at Columbia University in 2009, for which I offered my initial explorations of these ideas; to Rosemary Joyce for her extensive comments and advice on that earliest version; to Haidy Geismar and Fernando Dominguez and other members of the “NYC Materiality Group,” in particular Tom Abercrombie, Zoë Crossland ðagainÞ, Severin Fowles, Harvey Molotch, and Fred Myers, who offered critical comments on an intermediate version workshopped in 2011; to Andy Roddick for introducing me to Jean Lave’s work on learning and “communities of practice” and for co-organizing a session on that topic at the 2011 TAG meeting at Berkeley for which several sections of this article were originally written; to Asif Signs and Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 2013). © 2013 Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved. 2326-4489/2013/0101-0001$10.00