What is a ‘little guy’? It’s a descriptor often thrown around in Internet parlance, usually as part of a copypasta, like ‘I’m Just a Silly Little Guy“, or used in the vein of other memeified phrases, such as “smol bean“. It is often (but not exclusively) used to describe non-human things, from animals (real and otherwise) to inanimate objects. Above all, it’s something that simply provides the viewer with delight due to their size, which often increases the perceived ‘cuteness’ of the thing.
Archaeology, to my particular delight, is full of ‘little guys’. From small, meticulously crafted amulets to heftier votive figurines, past humans have always found opportunities to create smaller iterations of beings found in both heaven and earth. Some are admired for the precision and detail brought to such small figures without the use of modern technology; others are beloved for their lack of accurate detail, using instead more abstract and stylised approaches to their artistic interpretation. While people have always seemingly enjoyed these artefacts, the combined rise of social media along with the wave of museums digitising their collections and making them publicly accessible online has resulted in objects going viral and becoming their own category of digital culture. Some users have even become their own ‘curators’ of historic ‘little guys’, as seen in accounts like Weird Medieval Guys.
So why did people in the past create so many of these ‘little guys’? Despite figurines often being excavated in large quantities at a time, they are also sometimes recovered in contexts that are not so easily interpreted, such as within the liminal spaces between the domestic and the ritual. But broadly speaking, interpretations of such figurines will range from something as mundane as toys to the more spiritual and ritualised, such as communicative tools to speak to ancestral and otherworldly spirits (Marcus 2019, p.1). In prehistoric sites across Mesoamerica, for example, figurines shaped to look like human individuals may have been used as vessels for deceased ancestors to commune with the living (ibid, pp. 3-5). Hellenistic Babylonian figurines may have been powerful socio-cultural tools in which individuals could navigate identity within an increasingly multicultural world (Langin-Hooper 2015). Votive figurines in ancient Greece are often found in either mortuary or cult contexts, representing individuals, deities, or animals and usually functioning as a sort of offering or gift (Neer 2020, p. 21-22, 28). And while evidence of usage of figurines as toys can be problematic, there have been some well-reasoned interpretations of such from sites such as Palaeolithic Mal’ta in Siberia (Lbova 2021).
But why has the ‘little guy’ endured as such a beloved object type? How do we as a modern audience seem to feel so much affection for artefacts created thousands and thousands of years ago, often only viewed outside of the context from which they were initially created for? Part of the reason is likely to due with the miniaturised nature of many of these ‘little guys’, although scale will often vary. There are many theories as to why people enjoy miniatures in general, each contingent on the context from which it is exists. However, some common factors include inherently evoking curiosity in viewers by ‘defamiliarising’ otherwise recognisable objects, as well as ‘reifying care’ in a way that causes appreciation for the craft involved in their production (Jozwiak 2021, p. 171).
This is echoed in some theories posited by archaeologists, with Marcus (2019) arguing that the attraction to these figurines lies in the fact that “they are often so small that we can hold them in one hand. We can look at their tiny faces…as we try to divine what they meant to their makers” (p. 2). Langin-Hooper (2015) also notes that there is a comforting quality to the familiarity of something that is recognisable, yet scaled down to be literally “at one’s fingertips” (p. 62). This reoccurring emphasis on touch as an important factor in the significance of these figurines to people in the past is particularly interesting when considering how this relates to modern day audiences who will likely never get that tactile experience; and yet, perhaps it is the fact that these figurines look so inviting to touch and handling, actions that are forbidden by the cultural caretakers in museums and other institutions, that make them continually fascinating even to people today.
While the cultural importance of these ‘little guys’ may have changed over time – from tangible objects used for acts both mundane and sacred to digitised iterations which can be freely shared to online users around the world – there is still something wonderful about the fact that fascination and interest around these objects have persisted over thousands of years. It makes me wonder what sort of ‘little guys’ in our modern day lives may similarly persist in the cultural consciousness thousands of years from now – probably those Funko Pops, right?
References
Jozwiak, J. (2021) Miniature appreciation – what’s so great about little
models?, World Art, 11(2), pp. 149-175.
Langin-Hooper, S.M. (2015) Fascination with the tiny: social negotiation through miniatures in Hellenstic Babylonia. World Archaeology 47(1), pp. 60-79.
Lbova, L. (2021) The Siberian Paleolithic site of Mal’ta: a unique source for the study of childhood archaeology. Evolutionary Human Sciences 3(e9), pp. 1-11.
Marcus, J. (2019) Studying Figurines. Journal of Archaeological Research 27, pp. 1-47.
Neer, R. (2020) Small Wonders: Figurines, Puppets, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Archaic and Classical Greece. In J Elsner (ed) Figurines: Figuration and the Sense of Scale, Oxford University Press, pp. 11-50.
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