Some decades ago, my first archaeological excavation in the US Southwest involved a pueblo room filled with lenses of ash replete with restorable vessels, projectile points, and articulated fauna. At the time, we interpreted these materials to represent Schifferian “secondary refuse”; we assumed the ash itself represented nothing more than detritus from cooking hearths. It would be fascinating to revisit this assemblage in light of the issues raised in Barbara J. Roth and E. Charles Adams's edited volume, which focuses on the ritual uses and meanings of ash deposits in Indigenous North America. Ash and fire are “universal elements of human society” (p. 2), and the book's contributors are engaged in revisiting and reevaluating the common presence of ash in archaeological contexts. Through case studies that are well grounded in ethnographic literature, the book's authors convincingly argue that ash deposits often do not represent secondary refuse. Rather, ancient peoples intentionally deployed ash to effect transformations, protections, and connections across time.
Although none of the authors take an explicitly phenomenological stance, all of them are thinking creatively about the ways fire and its byproducts (heat, light, ash) affect the human experience. Because ash is created through the transformation of another material (wood), and because many ancient structures contained wooden elements, it is not surprising that many ancient peoples used ash for structural closure and renewal. This interpretation figures prominently in case studies presented by Adams as well as Samantha G. Fladd et alia (Homolov'i area, northeastern Arizona), Roth (Mimbres Mogollon), Susan C. Ryan (Mesa Verde region), and Anna Marie Prentiss et alia (British Columbia). Intentionally deposited ash lenses, smoke, and fire are associated with power and with change and continuity through time in case studies presented by Melissa R. Baltus and Sarah E. Baires (Cahokia), Marvin Kay (Caddo), and Christopher B. Rodning (Cherokee). Chapters by Michael A. Adler (northern Rio Grande), William Fox (Iroquois), and William H. Walker and Judy Berryman (southwest New Mexico) focus on ash used for protection and for medicinal purposes. For Cheryl Claassen (US Southeast, Great Basin) and James L. Fitzsimmons (Maya), ash lenses indicate specific kinds of practices (fertility, purification, the feeding of gods) not commonly considered by archaeologists. Other materials found associated with ash (turquoise, projectile points, faunal remains) also get closer scrutiny. All the case studies are interesting and well written; all contain complementary and overlapping ideas. The introductory chapter contains a helpful overview and table describing the ways chapter authors found ash to be used, along with archaeological and ethnographic/historic examples.
It is difficult to know whether any particular ash lens represents an intentional deposit—as a result, authors generally rely on aggregate data to show that past peoples’ ash use was patterned. Here, Ryan's contribution is particularly effective. She uses Crow Canyon's extensive site database to demonstrate that ash found in Mesa Verde-region hearths is unlikely to be simply the result of the occupants’ last meal—rather, inhabitants deposited ash and other materials to decommission the features. Another standout chapter is Claassen's discussion of ash, ground stone, and textile deposits from dry caves in the US Southeast and the Great Basin. She argues that these sites may represent women's shelters, where women (in addition to carrying out gender-specific tasks) repeatedly burned bloody menstrual materials.
Like many edited volumes, the book reads unevenly. Authors call on a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, from “symbolism” (Fladd et al.) to animate “bundling” (Baltus and Baires) to a rather unconvincing marriage of behavioral archaeology with Gell and Latour (Walker and Berryman). In the six chapters focused on cases from the US Southwest (and, indeed, in several other chapters), authors repeat the same strings of references, ethnographic examples, and general arguments. As a result, almost any of the book's chapters could easily be read as a stand-alone (which is both a strength and a weakness of the volume). At the book's end, I found myself wishing for a deeper attempt at synthesis and comparison across time and space. Should ash deposition as a closure practice be considered part of a broader package of ideas (e.g., color symbolism, directional cosmographies) shared across North America (as Fladd et al. intimate on p. 71)? Fitzsimmons's evocative portrayal of ash as the residue of Maya deities’ bloody meals takes a very different direction from the more benign prophylactic and transformative purposes described by most other authors. What might ash use look like in other regions of the world where it has been well studied (cf. Nicole Boivin, “Landscape and Cosmology in the South Indian Neolithic: New Perspectives on the Deccan Ashmounds,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 14:235–257, 2004)? Such questions are beyond the scope of this volume. Roth and Adams state that the purpose of this collection of North American case studies is “to highlight practices involving ash and to encourage archaeologists to be more aware of the active role ash deposition played in creating the archaeological record” (p. 10). In this, they are quite successful.
