Reading :: Early Body Ornaments and the Origins of Our Semiotic Mind

 Early Body Ornaments and the Origins of Our Semiotic Mind

by Antonis Iliopoulos

I have to confess that I have tried to become interested in semiotics many times, but have failed. Perhaps it’s because semiotic systems quickly seem to get into complex details. Certainly the little I have read about Peirce’s system, with its late-19th-century-sounding terms (semisign, qualisign, legisign, etc.), has left me feeling lost in the details and impatient with the distinctions. 

Antonis Iliopoulis’ latest book has not cured me of that. But what it has done is to demonstrate how Peirce’s system can be used productively to think through how material signs came to be signs, laddering up from materials to meanings. Iliopoulis was a student of Lambros Malafouris’, and he pairs Peirce with Material Engagement Theory (MET) to develop this materialist account, focusing on early body ornaments: perforated shell beads from Blombos Cave, South Africa. The result is more complex and provides a better explanation (I think) than the hoary old distinctions between signifier and signified (Sausseure) or between tool and sign (Vygotsky and Luria), which are too simple to address the question of how materials function as signs. 

Iliopoulis begins in Chapter 1 by discussing the debate about modern human origins. What does it mean when we find evidence of human use of signs, such as a shell that has been perforated so it could be used as a bead? One interpretation is that “our body ornaments are but an invention meant to serve our personal or communal strategies” — and thus those people have “a modern mind,” i.e., a mind that expects and interprets signs (p.2). That is, “ornaments seem to be a good proxy for symbolism because they had been arguably involved in the transmission of information about their wearers” (p.3). This leads us to expect that the first appearance of body ornaments could coincide with the modern mind, and thus language: “our search for ‘the origins’ of material signification leads us to a question that we have yet to address: When did body ornaments first appear?” (p.4). Discoveries keep pushing this threshold back — currently back to 74 thousand years ago (74 kya) (p.6). But this threshold depends on an inference:

The Blombos inference is a tripartite series of inferences, according to which the perforated shells can be used to infer the use (by the cave’s inhabitants) of (1) artifacts, (2) symbols, and (3) syntactical language. (p.7)

Here, (1) shells are inferred to be beads, (2) beads are inferred to be symbols, and (3) symbols are inferred to indicate language use (p.7). He explores each of these inferences in the literature, then notes that “While there are no doubts about the artifactual nature of the shells, the symbolic and linguistic status of the beads has been questioned by an increasing minority of scholars” (p.26), arguing that

addressing the role of early body ornaments in the evolution of the human mind means addressing two main questions currently under debate:

1. How did early body ornaments convey their meanings?

2. And how did these forms and meanings come into being in the first place? (p.26).

Chapter 2 examines theories for describing the nature of past material signs, examining a range of archaeological theories, including MET. He concludes:

I ultimately arrived at the conclusion that prehistoric material signs, such as early body ornaments, will be best described through a detailed version of Peircean semiotics, especially if complemented with Sonesson’s semiotic tools [note: Sonesson extended Peircean semiotics]. Unlike linguocentric approaches, Peirce’s semiotic theory can indeed account for the materiality of material signs because it treats significative meaning as emergent from the interaction of mind and matter (besides just as mental), iconic and indexical (besides just as arbitrary), and constitutive (besides just as referential). (p.55). 

Chapter 3 overviews Peirce’s semiotic theory. I won’t summarize it here, but I’ll note that Iliopoulos classifies ten Peircean signs and relates them hierarchically in a diagram (Figure 3.2), with higher-order signs implicating lower-ordered ones (p.80). It was here that I could begin to see the promise of Iliopoulos’ work, since these relationships create a “ladder” (my term, not his) that moves from materiality to increasing levels of signification. 

Chapter 4 applies this system to body ornaments. The figures in this chapter recapitulate parts of Figure 3.2, using them as a conceptual language for describing propositions such as “signifying their wearer’s wealth” (Figure 4.2, p.98) and “Such beadworks signify their wearer’s ‘status.’” (Figure 4.3, p.100). 

Chapter 5 turns its attention to finding an appropriate theory to trace the emergence of prehistoric material signs. No surprise here, after overviewing nine major accounts, he lands on MET and discusses its theoretical compatibility with Peirce. 

Chapter 6 then brings together pragmatic semiotics and enactive cognition, developing a theory of cognitive semiotics that can account for “the scaffolded evolution of material signs” (p.145). Here’s a long quote describing this scaffolding:

it would have been a scaffolding mechanism of this sort that drove the development of material signification during the Paleolithic. It should be reasonable to assume that during the course of human evolution, significative artifacts would have first functioned in the lower-order iconic and indexical levels before ascending to and becoming parts of higher-order symbolic levels. This should not be taken as a deterministic proposition according to which ascending through these levels would have taken place in a linear and step-like manner because signs fall under different kinds, rather than degrees, of complication (Sonesson 2013a, 2013c). Nonetheless, the relations of implication in Peirce’s tenfold typology should give us a broad idea of how rituals, which can be viewed as cultural syllogisms (Argumentative Symbolic Legisigns—class 10), could have been founded on artifactual sign-vehicles with physical relations and qualities (Dicentic Indexical Sinsigns and Rhematic Iconic Sinsigns—class 4 and 2, respectively). While the links between these significative sorts are best considered to have been bidirectional (in that artifacts support rituals, and rituals dictate the form and use of artifacts), it should be reasonable to maintain that the similarity and contiguity/factorality between things would have been perceived and conceived as significative before the development of purely arbitrary concepts and cultural practices. If this was indeed the case, then the development of iconic and indexical signs would have scaffolded the formation of symbolic narratives. (p.147)

Chapter 7 applies this theory to body ornaments, describing how shells obtained through trade could have been perceived as valuable, then in being worn, transfer the quality of perceived value to the wearer. In the process, he argues, “it is early humans’ engagement with new kinds of material signs, such as ornaments, that would have catalyzed the development of personal identity and self-awareness” (p.175). 

Chapter 8 concludes with a summary and implications.

I’m not an archaeologist, so I am not able to evaluate the book as an archaeologist would. But as someone familiar with MET and affiliated theoretical approaches (Vygotskian mediation, distributed and situated cognition, extended cognition, etc.), I found it to be a carefully constructed and tightly reasoned read. The scaffolding of signification makes sense to me from a material perspective and — although I confess I still check out when reading about the 10 different Peircean signs — I can follow how this scaffolding could move us from materials to signs. From my perspective, the book is important, and well worth reading for anyone who is interested in questions of materiality and meaning. If that’s you, definitely pick it up.