New Perspectives on Prehistoric Art

New Perspectives on Prehistoric Art PDF Author: Günter Berghaus
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313059578
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Following the discovery of Franco-Caribbean cave art in the nineteenth century, standard interpretations of these works usually revolved around hunting, magic, and fertility cults. Orthodox positions such as these have weighed heavily on later generations of art historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, even those whose views dissented from those of their predecessors. In the last few decades, however, new approaches to cave art, often based on discoveries made in Africa, Asia, Australia, North America, and the Arctic region, have produced new insights into possible meanings and functions of prehistoric paintings and sculptures. This new collection of essays explores these insights, gathering the observations of eight experts from a variety of disciplines, and examining some of the social and spiritual functions of a variety of artistic genres ranging from 40,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C. These insights, which derive from evolutionary biology, feminist scholarship, ritual studies, and new modes of anthropology, argue collectively that prehistoric art was a culture-specific form of communication that should be interpreted in the social context of early hunger-gatherer societies and should not be measured with the criteria and paradigms of modern art. Essential reading for anyone interested in prehistoric art or its cultural implications, this volume represents a bold step forward in the research and analysis of the very first artists.

New Perspectives on Prehistoric Art

New Perspectives on Prehistoric Art PDF Author: Günter Berghaus
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313059578
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Following the discovery of Franco-Caribbean cave art in the nineteenth century, standard interpretations of these works usually revolved around hunting, magic, and fertility cults. Orthodox positions such as these have weighed heavily on later generations of art historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, even those whose views dissented from those of their predecessors. In the last few decades, however, new approaches to cave art, often based on discoveries made in Africa, Asia, Australia, North America, and the Arctic region, have produced new insights into possible meanings and functions of prehistoric paintings and sculptures. This new collection of essays explores these insights, gathering the observations of eight experts from a variety of disciplines, and examining some of the social and spiritual functions of a variety of artistic genres ranging from 40,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C. These insights, which derive from evolutionary biology, feminist scholarship, ritual studies, and new modes of anthropology, argue collectively that prehistoric art was a culture-specific form of communication that should be interpreted in the social context of early hunger-gatherer societies and should not be measured with the criteria and paradigms of modern art. Essential reading for anyone interested in prehistoric art or its cultural implications, this volume represents a bold step forward in the research and analysis of the very first artists.

Making Scenes

Making Scenes PDF Author: Iain Davidson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789209218
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dating back to at least 50,000 years ago, rock art is one of the oldest forms of human symbolic expression. Geographically, it spans all the continents on Earth. Scenes are common in some rock art, and recent work suggests that there are some hints of expression that looks like some of the conventions of western scenic art. In this unique volume examining the nature of scenes in rock art, researchers examine what defines a scene, what are the necessary elements of a scene, and what can the evolutionary history tell us about storytelling, sequential memory, and cognitive evolution among ancient and living cultures?

Recent Perspectives on Prehistoric Art in India and Allied Subjects

Recent Perspectives on Prehistoric Art in India and Allied Subjects PDF Author: R. K. Sharma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description


Archaeologies of Rock Art

Archaeologies of Rock Art PDF Author: Andrés Troncoso
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351869086
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rock art in South America is as diverse as the continent itself. In this vast territory, different peoples produced engravings, paintings, and massive earthworks, from the Atacama to the Amazon. These marks on the landscape were made by all different kinds of peoples, from some of the earliest hunter-gatherers in the continent, to the very complex societies within the Inca Empire. This book brings together the work of specialists from throughout the continent, addressing this diversity, as well as the variety of approaches that the Archaeology of rock art has taken in South America. Constructed of eleven thought-provoking chapters and arranged in three thematic sections, the book presents different theoretical approaches that are currently being used to understand the roles rock art played in prehistoric communities. The editors have skillfully crafted a book that presents the contribution the study of South American rock art can offer to the global research of this materiality, both theoretically and methodologically. This book will interest a broad range of scholars researching in archaeology, anthropology, history of art, heritage and conservation, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students who will find interesting case studies showcasing the diverse ways in which rock art can be approached. Despite its focus on South America, the book is intended as a contribution towards the global study of rock art.

New Perspectives on Pottery Mound Pueblo

New Perspectives on Pottery Mound Pueblo PDF Author: Polly Schaafsma
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826339065
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
Noted archaeologist Polly Schaafsma presents new research by current scholars on this largely neglected ancestral Puebloan site.

Prehistoric Japan

Prehistoric Japan PDF Author: Keiji Imamura
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135362408
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
An illustrated introduction to the prehistory of Japan, treated in its own right and not as a minor part of East Asia in general.

Breaking the Surface

Breaking the Surface PDF Author: Douglass Whitfield Bailey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190611871
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, offering detailed critiques of current interpretations of these earliest European architectural constructions. The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Magura in Romania), with the work of three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with cultural diversity in framing spatial reference and through an examination of pre-modern ungrounded ways of living. Breaking the Surface is as much a creative act on its own-in its mixture of work from disparate periods and regions, its use of radical text interruption, and its juxtaposition of text and imagery-as it is an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture. Unflinching and exhilarating, it is a major development in the growing subdiscipline of art/archaeology.

Perspectives on Prehistoric Trade and Exchange in California and the Great Basin

Perspectives on Prehistoric Trade and Exchange in California and the Great Basin PDF Author: Richard E. Hughes
Publisher: University of Utah Press
ISBN: 1607812002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume investigates the circumstances and conditions under which trade/exchange, direct access, and/or mobility best account for material conveyance across varying distances at different times in the past.

New Perspectives on Household Archaeology

New Perspectives on Household Archaeology PDF Author: Bradley J. Parker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781575062525
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in this volume represent substantially revised versions of papers presented at the conference "Household Archaeology in the Middle East and Beyond: Theory, Method, and Practice." This three-day meeting took place between February 19 and 21, 2009 at Fort Douglas on the campus of The University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

The Artful Species

The Artful Species PDF Author: Stephen Davies
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191015857
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Artful Species explores the idea that our aesthetic responses and art behaviors are connected to our evolved human nature. Our humanoid forerunners displayed aesthetic sensibilities hundreds of thousands of years ago and the art standing of prehistoric cave paintings is virtually uncontested. In Part One, Stephen Davies analyses the key concepts of the aesthetic, art, and evolution, and explores how they might be related. He considers a range of issues, including whether animals have aesthetic tastes and whether art is not only universal but cross-culturally comprehensible. Part Two examines the many aesthetic interests humans take in animals and how these reflect our biological interests, and the idea that our environmental and landscape preferences are rooted in the experiences of our distant ancestors. In considering the controversial subject of human beauty, evolutionary psychologists have traditionally focused on female physical attractiveness in the context of mate selection, but Davies presents a broader view which decouples human beauty from mate choice and explains why it goes more with social performance and self-presentation. Part Three asks if the arts, together or singly, are biological adaptations, incidental byproducts of nonart adaptations, or so removed from biology that they rate as purely cultural technologies. Davies does not conclusively support any one of the many positions considered here, but argues that there are grounds, nevertheless, for seeing art as part of human nature. Art serves as a powerful and complex signal of human fitness, and so cannot be incidental to biology. Indeed, aesthetic responses and art behaviors are the touchstones of our humanity.