"The Matter of Magic: Material Figures of Memory and Protection in Neo -Assyrian Apotropaic Figurine Rituals (First Millennium BC)" by Carolyn M. Nakamura

Carolyn M. Nakamura

Deposited 2008

Abstract
This dissertation research brings an anthropological, practice-based perspective to the interpretation of a known form of ancient Assyrian magic. Specifically, my research reexamines previously excavated Neo-Assyrian (c. 858-610 BC) protective figurine deposits buried under house floors, and the related ritual texts. My engagement with this practice critically addresses the various levels of its constitution—from its general characterization as an assemblage, to its more discursive and historical specifications as archaeological evidence, as figurine deposits, and as magical objects. I also consider the interpretive possibilities and limitations that each of these frames of understanding entail. A central theme of this work concerns the tracking of meaning-formation in both ancient (Assyrian) and contemporary (Assyriological) contexts. In the first instance, I take the matter of magic (protection) seriously, by tracking the circulation and transformation of meaning in magical operations. Such movements are often mediated by things with substance, be they object, landscape, architecture, human, plant or animal. Here I argue that the buried figurine deposits mediated protection by stabilizing human-divine relationships and 're-membering' time. In the second instance, I present a critical consideration of Assyriology itself, its epistemological commitments and the particular ways in which it constructs the objects and subjects of its study. I situate the Neo-Assyrian practice within this culture of expertise, and then proceed to reconstitute it within a social archaeological perspective.
On a broader scale, this research chases a kind of experimental interpretive archaeology, as it pursues the possibility of a knowledge-form emergent from the cross-interrogation of a particular past (Neo-Assyrian protective figurine deposit rituals) and its common referents (magic, figurine, text, image) that silently broker our various understandings of it. This dissertation partakes in the emergent study of material culture that interrogates worlds as collective mixtures of nature and culture, human and non-human, past, present and future. It demonstrates how a turn towards network-based approaches that have largely come out of ethnographies of science are poised to open up numerous possibilities for archaeological research and interpretation.