Professor Daniel Arsenault, along with his wife, Nadine Desbiens, and stepson, Jacob Desbiens-Doyle, were sadly taken from this world in 2016 following a tragic car accident. Daniel was the leading exponent in Canadian Shield rock art. Working in the northern part of Quebec, Daniel explored many hundreds of square kilometres of this vast area for rock art. Working with ethnographers and First Nation people, Daniel became a formidable force in promoting this little known assemblage, lecturing all over the world and stimulating audiences wherever he went. Complementing his knowledge of rock art, Daniel also had a deep understanding of the heritage of the people whose ancestors made the images. Shortly before his death, Daniel was made an Erasmus Mundus Professor at Polytechnic Institute of Tomar in Portugal. Here, he was due to share his wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm about rock art and cultural heritage to an attentive audience. Daniel clearly had much more to offer, and this book is an extension of his ways of thinking. He has left an important legacy that has touched the lives of many, including people who contributed to this volume. The book has 14 thought-provoking chapters and deals with Daniel's first love - the archaeology of artistic endeavour. It gathers together both academic colleagues and family who share with the reader elements of Daniel's life. The book is also a serious academic volume, providing the reader with new ideas about the interpretation and dating of rock art, ethnography, heritage and material culture.

It has often been claimed that "monsters"--supernatural creatures with bodies composed from multiple species--play a significant part in the thought and imagery of all people from all times. "The Origins of Monsters" advances an alternative view. Composite figurations are intriguingly rare and isolated in the art of the prehistoric era. Instead it was with the rise of cities, elites, and cosmopolitan trade networks that "monsters" became widespread features of visual production in the ancient world. Showing how these fantastic images originated and how they were transmitted, David Wengrow identifies patterns in the records of human image-making and embarks on a search for connections between mind and culture.

Wengrow asks: Can cognitive science explain the potency of such images? Does evolutionary psychology hold a key to understanding the transmission of symbols? How is our making and perception of images influenced by institutions and technologies? Wengrow considers the work of art in the first age of mechanical reproduction, which he locates in the Middle East, where urban life began. Comparing the development and spread of fantastic imagery across a range of prehistoric and ancient societies, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and China, he explores how the visual imagination has been shaped by a complex mixture of historical and universal factors.

Examining the reasons behind the dissemination of monstrous imagery in ancient states and empires, "The Origins of Monsters" sheds light on the relationship between culture and cognition.

This book contains a series of selected papers presented at two symposia entitled 'Scientific study of rock art', one held in the IFRAO Congress of Rock Art in La Paz, Bolivia, in June 2012, the other held in the IFRAO Congress in Caceres, Spain, in September 2015; as well as some invited papers from leading rock art scientists. The core topic of the book is the presentation of scientific approaches to the materiality of rock art, ranging from recording and sampling methods to data analyses. These share the fact that they provide means of testing hypotheses and/or of finding trends in the data which can be used as independent sources of evidence to support specific interpretations. The issue of the materiality of visual productions of the distant past, which in archaeological theory has attracted much attention recently and has stimulated much conceptual debate, is addressed through a variety of scientific approaches, including fieldwork methods, laboratory work techniques and/or data analysis protocols. These, in turn, will provide new insights into human agency and people-image engagements through the study of rock art production, display and use.

A companion to The Archaeology of Rock-Art (Cambridge, 1998), this new collection addresses the most important component of the rock-art panel: its landscape. The book draws together the work of many well-known scholars from key regions of the world known for rock-art and rock-art research. It provides insight into the location and structure of rock-art and its role within the landscapes of ancient worlds.

Primitive art is inseparable from primitive consciousness and can be correctly understood only with the correct socio-cultural context. This book examines the ancient art of Siberia as part of the integral whole of ancient society.

A Pre-Columbian art lover and noted curator journey into a fine art collection, describing the rich cultural context and artistic merits of each work. Along with 150 full-colour glossy illustrations of the terracotta, earthenware, stone, silver and copper objects, the acclaimed author, explorer and filmmaker Hugh Thomson gives a detailed, exciting narrative, based upon extensive research, of the role art played in the conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes and of Peru by Francisco Pizarro. It is rare that a collector takes such a personal, descriptive part in publishing his treasure trove, but in this lavishly illustrated book, Stuart Handler describes why he gathered Pre-Columbian art, what attracted him to the individual pieces, and, from his forty-five years of building art collections in various media and genres, what artistic attributes make these objects outstanding works of art.

In this volume, contributors show how stylistic and iconographic analyses of Mississippian imagery provide new perspectives on the beliefs, narratives, public ceremonies, ritual regimes, and expressions of power in the communities that created the artwork. Exploring various methodological and theoretical approaches to pre-Columbian visual culture, these essays reconstruct dynamic accounts of Native American history across the U.S. Southeast. These case studies offer innovative examples of how to use style to identify and compare artifacts, how symbols can be interpreted in the absence of writing, and how to situate and historicize Mississippian imagery. They examine designs carved into shell, copper, stone, and wood or incised into ceramic vessels, from spider iconography to owl effigies and depictions of the cosmos. They discuss how these symbols intersect with memory, myths, social hierarchies, religious traditions, and other spheres of Native American life in the past and present. The tools modeled in this volume will open new horizons for learning about the culture and worldviews of past peoples.

First published in 2012, this catalogue presents fifty-six Etruscan, Greek, and Italic carved ambers from the Getty Museum's collection-the second largest body of this material in the United States and one of the most important in the world. The ambers date from about 650 to 300 BC. The catalogue offers full description of the pieces, including typology, style, chronology, condition, and iconography. Each piece is illustrated. The catalogue is preceded by a general introduction to ancient amber (which was also published in 2012 as a stand-alone print volume titled Amber and the Ancient World). Through exquisite visual examples and vivid classical texts, this book examines the myths and legends woven around amber-its employment in magic and medicine, its transport and carving, and its incorporation into jewelry, amulets, and other objects of prestige. This publication highlights a group of remarkable amber carvings at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the soliform figures in schematic cave paintings. The author presents research on all the global factors relevant to the study of these figures (technological, typological, stylistic, semiotic, astronomical, anthropological and landscape) and their relationship with the whole of schematic rock paintings and the societies that produced them. The geographical scope of the study is the area of Laguna de la Janda and Campo de Gibraltar (Cadiz). One of the arguments the author maintains in this research is the shortage of studies conducted in the territory of Cadiz in relation to these figures – and to rock art in general, which has been a central motif in almost all primitive religions or mythologies since the birth of agricultural societies. The recurrence of abstract motifs within the rock art of this area, and its durability over time, could be an indication of common cultural patterns among the different populations that inhabited the province. But these same signs are also repeated in different parts of the world – could it therefore suggest universal aspects of our species? The interpretation of these symbols has been – and continues to be – subject to intangible or subjective issues; therefore, it is not exempt from possible projections of our own culture. We think that we are able to approach, in a scientific way, the ritual and symbolic aspects of those who elaborated these paintings. In this book, the author proposes an alternative according to the theoretical framework of disciplines such as ethnography, anthropology, landscape archaeology, archaeoastronomy and semiotics.

An Engraved Landscape is a contextual analysis of a substantial new corpus of engravings from the Wadi al-Ajal, situated in the Central Saharan region of south west Libya. The wadi is renowned as the heartland of the Garamantian civilization, which emerged from local mobile Pastoral communities in the 1st millennium BC, and dominated trans-Saharan trade and politics for over a thousand years. Extensive archaeological and palaeoenvironmental investigations in recent years have provided detailed insight into the later prehistory and protohistory of the wadi and surrounding areas. However, prior to the fieldwork detailed in this volume, only a handful of carvings had been recorded in the wadi. This volume is based on systematic survey, conducted between 2004 and 2009, which recorded around 2,500 previously unknown or unpublished engraved and inscribed rock surfaces. All forms of engraving, whether figurative or surface markings, were viewed as significant residues of human interaction with the rock surface and were recorded. The resulting database provides an opportunity to analyse the engravings in relation to their changing physical and cultural contexts, and the discussion offers a fresh interpretation of Saharan rock art based on this substantial new evidence. An Engraved Landscape also captures in detail a unique heritage resource that is currently inaccessible and threatened. This record of the fragile engravings provides an important source of information for researchers and students. The Gazetteer is presented in Volume 2.

The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals offers an in-depth exploration of the changing traditions of belief in pre-Bronze and Bronze Age North Asia. Esther Jacobson-Tepfer centers her argument on a female deity and her evolution up until the early Iron Age, across a 2,000 year period. Through the art historical and archaeological evidence of the symbolic systems left behind, she traces the progression of the deity from an originating animal mother through her incarnation as the mother of animals, her late embodiment as the guardian of the road to the land of the dead, the transformation of her essential liminality into the structures of predation and, in the form of a predated stag, her subsequent destruction. In detailed commentaries on rock art structures and monuments, Jacobson-Tepfer reconstructs and explores how the deity's power was embedded in the Janus-faced concept of life/death: how, in all her forms, the deity occupied the threshold between the worlds of humans and ancestors, humans and animals. More broadly, this study details how her fate was directly related to the sociological evolution at the onset of the Iron age: the transition of the cultures in South Siberia and Mongolia from hunting-based settlement to horse-dependent semi-nomadism, and with that the rise of a heroic narrative tradition. Jacobson-Tepfer has had unparalleled access to regional data still unavailable in the West, and the collection of this data in English as well as her extensive collection of color photographs and drawings will fill a gaping hole in the literature and prove invaluable to both archaeologists and art historians.The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals will surely become a standard reference for both disciplines as well as a guide to those interested in rock art and beliefs systems more generally.

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the Romans' defeat of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.
Zanker's exciting new interpretations closely compare poetry and art for the light each sheds on the other. He finds, for example, an exuberant expansion of subject matter in the Hellenistic periods in both literature and art, as styles and iconographic traditions reserved for grander concepts in earlier eras were applied to themes, motifs, and subjects that were emphatically less grand.