From archaeology's beginnings, indeed from well before the study of antiquities attained the rigor implied by the term, artifacts have been central to our understanding of the prehistoric past. Using mobile products of human activity to infer status is also a time-honored practice. One basic approach attempts to infer inequality from the presence (and quantity when possible), of certain items in the assemblage, a line of reasoning that depends on our ability to recognize status, elite, or wealth items apart from a distributional context. Another basic approach makes use of the unequal distribution of artifacts in such contexts as burials, hoards, residences, and regions. This chapter covers two additional topics because they relate more to artifacts than burials or architecture: iconography and the inference of stratification. Further approaches to distinguishing stratified from non-stratified ranking are elaborated in the next chapter.

Status markers: elite goods and sumptuary items

Is it possible to show that something was a status item apart from distributional context, and so infer ranking from its presence alone? Hodder is certainly correct in saying that “to look at objects by themselves is really not archaeology at all,” that material objects alone are mute and it is context that provides clues to their meaning (1991b:4). But while Hodder has in mind the traditional view of an artifact's context – the spatial associations of careful excavation – I suggest that knowledge of how items are used among other people constitutes an alternative context appropriate for drawing inferences from artifacts.