Cave art is a subject of perennial interest among archaeologists. Until recently it was assumed that it was largely restricted to southern France and northern Iberia, although in recent years new discoveries have demonstrated that it originally had a much wider distribution. The discovery in 2003 of the UK's first examples of cave art, in two caves at Creswell Crags on the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border, was the most surprising illustration of this. The discoverers (the editors of the book) brought together in 2004 a number of Palaeolithic archaeologists and rock art specialists from across the world to study the Creswell art and debate its significance, and its similarities and contrasts with contemporary Late Pleistocene ('Ice Age') art on the Continent. This comprehensively illustrated book presents the Creswell art itself, the archaeology of the caves and the region, and the wider context of the Upper Palaeolithic era in Britain, as well as a number of up-to-date studies of Palaeolithic cave art in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy which serve to contextualize the British examples.

Named after an archaeological site discovered in 1951 in Zhengzhou, China, the Erligang civilization arose in the Yellow River valley around the middle of the second millennium BCE. Shortly thereafter, its distinctive elite material culture spread to a large part of China's Central Plain, in the south reaching as far as the banks of the Yangzi River. The Erligang culture is best known for the remains of an immense walled city at Zhengzhou, a smaller site at Panlongcheng in Hubei, and a large-scale bronze industry of remarkable artistic and technological sophistication.

This richly illustrated book is the first in a western language devoted to the Erligang culture. It brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines, including art history and archaeology, to explore what is known about the culture and its spectacular bronze industry. The opening chapters introduce the history of the discovery of the culture and its most important archaeological sites. Subsequent essays address a variety of important methodological issues related to the study of Erligang, including how to define the culture, the usefulness of cross-cultural comparative study, and the difficulty of reconciling traditional Chinese historiography with archaeological discoveries. The book closes by examining the role the Erligang civilization played in the emergence of the first bronze-using societies in south China and the importance of bronze studies in the training of Chinese art historians.

The contributors are Robert Bagley, John Baines, Maggie Bickford, Rod Campbell, Li Yung-ti, Robin McNeal, Kyle Steinke, Wang Haicheng, and Zhang Changping.

The Element summarises the state of knowledge about four styles of prehistoric rock art in Europe current between the late Mesolithic period and the Iron Age. They are the Levantine, Macroschematic and Schematic traditions in the Iberian Peninsula; the Atlantic style that extended between Portugal, Spain, Britain and Ireland; Alpine rock art; and the pecked and painted images found in Fennoscandia. They are interpreted in relation to the landscapes in which they were made. Their production is related to monument building, the decoration of portable objects, trade and long distance travel, burial rites, and warfare. A final discussion considers possible connections between these separate traditions and the changing subject matter of rock art in relation to wider developments in European prehistoric societies.

Petroglyphic rock art in three valleys of Mongolia's Altai Mountains reveals the anatomy of deep time at the boundary between Central and North Asia. Inscribed over a period of twelve millennia, its subject matter, styles, and manner of execution reflect the constraints of changing geology, climate, and vegetation. These valleys were created and shaped by ancient glaciers. Analysis of their physical environment, projected from the deep past to the present, begins to explain the rhythm of cultural manifestations: where rock art appears, when it disappears, and why. The material and this remote arena offer an ideal laboratory to study the intersection of prehistoric culture and paleoenvironment.

In April 1937, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted an exhibition that served as a catalyst for the appropriation of prehistoric rock art in postwar abstract painting. With the title "Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa", it displayed a range of copies from the influential collection of the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius. Largely disregarded in modern American art history up until now, this book highlights the importance of this exhibition to artists such as Josef Albers, Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, and The American Abstract Artists group, who sought inspiration from the prehistoric images’ primordial creativity. With a transnational scope, this book reveals new facts about the connections between Paris and New York, and the importance of communication and collaboration between them for these artists. In doing so, Seibert shows that this debate was about more than just legitimizing abstract art forms from the past, but about recognizing an autonomous American abstract art. Presenting unseen archival material, letters, and exhibition documentation, Prehistoric Pictures and American Modernism offers a new reading of the development of modern American abstraction, and will hold an important place in the historiography of the movement, its global traditions, and its legacy.

It was 1830 when an English scientist named Henry De la Beche painted the first piece of paleoart, a dazzling, deliciously macabre vision of prehistoric reptiles battling underwater. Since then, artists the world over have conjured up visions of dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, cavemen, and other creatures, shaping our understanding of the primeval past through their exhilarating images. In this unprecedented new book, writer Zoe Lescaze and artist Walton Ford present the astonishing history of paleoart from 1830 to 1990. These are not cave paintings produced thousands of years ago, but modern visions of prehistory: stunning paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, mosaics, and murals that mingle scientific fact with unbridled fantasy. The collection provides an in-depth look at this neglected niche of art history and shows how the artists charged with imagining extinct creatures often projected their own aesthetic whims onto prehistory, rendering the primordial past with dashes of Romanticism, Impressionism, Japonisme, Fauvism, and Art Nouveau, among other influences. With an incisive essay from Lescaze, a preface by Ford, four fold-outs, and dozens of details, the book showcases a stunning collection of artworks culled from major natural history museums, obscure archives, and private collections, and includes new photography of key works, including Charles R. Knight's seminal paintings in Chicago and little-known masterpieces such as A. M. Belashov's monumental mosaic in Moscow. From the fearsome to the fantastical, Paleoart is a celebration of prehistoric animals in art, and a novel chance to understand our favorite extinct beasts through an art historical lens.

The history of ceramics is rooted in the history of mankind. Jamaican Ceramics: A Historical and Contemporary Survey is a comprehensive examination of the development of ceramics from pre-history to the present day. This visually rich, exciting and authoritative book is an unprecedented survey which sheds light on the fascinating historical and modern contemporary Jamaican ceramics. Norma Rodney Harrack, herself a practicing ceramic artist, offers an expert's insight and provides a valuable resource to ceramists, students, collectors, enthusiasts and users of ceramics. The chapters each focus on key thematic areas - from early ceramic history to the influence of European ceramic practices to the syncreticism and continuity of African Jamaican pottery traditions - with full discussions on how the canon of Jamaican ceramics has developed over centuries. Harrack's many years of teaching and investigation have guided much of the primary research for this project.

This book examines the development of ancient Greek civilization through a path-breaking application of social scientific theories. David B. Small charts the rise of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations and the unique characteristics of the later classical Greeks through the lens of ancient social structure and complexity theory, opening up new ideas and perspectives on these societies. He argues that Minoan and Mycenaean institutions evolved from elaborate feasting, and that the genesis of Greek colonization was born from structural chaos in the eighth century. Small isolates distinctions between Iron Age Crete and the rest of the Greek world, focusing on important differences in social structure. His book differs from others on Ancient Greece, highlighting the perpetuation of classical Greek social structure into the middle years of the Roman Empire, and concluding with a comparison of the social structure of classical Greece to that of the classical Maya civilization.

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.

Creativity is an integral part of human history, yet most studies focus on the modern era, leaving unresolved questions about the formative role that creativity has played in the past. This book explores the fundamental nature of creativity in the European Bronze Age. Considering developments in crafts that we take for granted today, such as pottery, textiles, and metalwork, the volume compares and contrasts various aspects of their development, from the construction of the materials themselves, through the production processes, to the design and effects deployed in finished objects. It explores how creativity is closely related to changes in material culture, how it directs responses to the new and unfamiliar, and how it has resulted in changes to familiar things and practices. Written by an international team of scholars, the case studies in this volume consider wider issues and provide detailed insights into creative solutions found in specific objects.

Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology invites readers to reconsider the contents and agendas of the art historical and world-culture canons by looking at one of their most historically enduring components: the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East. Ann Shafer, Amy Rebecca Gansell, and other top researchers in the field examine and critique the formation and historical transformation of the ancient Near Eastern canon of art, architecture, and material culture. Contributors flesh out the current boundaries of regional and typological sub-canons, analyze the technologies of canon production (such as museum practices and classroom pedagogies), and voice first-hand heritage perspectives. Each chapter, thereby, critically engages with the historiography behind our approach to the Near East and proposes alternative constructs. Collectively, the essays confront and critique the ancient Near Eastern canon's present configuration and re-imagine its future role in the canon of world art as a whole. This expansive collection of essays covers the Near East's many regions, eras, and types of visual and archaeological materials, offering specific and actionable proposals for its study. Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology stands as a vital benchmark and offers a collective path forward for the study and appreciation of Near Eastern cultural heritage. This book acts as a model for similar inquiries across global art historical and archaeological fields and disciplines.

Founded in the first century BCE near a set of natural springs in an otherwise dry northeastern corner of the Valley of Mexico, the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacan was on a symbolic level a city of elements. With a multiethnic population of perhaps one hundred thousand, at its peak in 400 CE, it was the cultural, political, economic, and religious center of ancient Mesoamerica. A devastating fire in the city center led to a rapid decline after the middle of the sixth century, but Teotihuacan was never completely abandoned or forgotten; the Aztecs revered the city and its monuments, giving many of them the names we still use today. Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire examines new discoveries from the three main pyramids at the site-the Sun Pyramid, the Moon Pyramid, and, at the center of the Ciudadela complex, the Feathered Serpent Pyramid-which have fundamentally changed our understanding of the city's history. With illustrations of the major objects from Mexico City's Museo Nacional de Antropologia and from the museums and storage facilities of the Zona de Monumentos Arqueologicos de Teotihuacan, along with selected works from US and European collections, the catalogue examines these cultural artifacts to understand the roles that offerings of objects and programs of monumental sculpture and murals throughout the city played in the lives of Teotihuacan's citizens. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Exhibition dates: de Young, San Francisco, September 30, 2017-February 11, 2018 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), March-June 2018

This book examines ancient figurines from several world areas to address recurring challenges in the interpretation of prehistoric art. Sometimes figurines from one context are perceived to resemble those from another. Richard G. Lesure asks whether such resemblances play a role in our interpretations. Early interpreters seized on the idea that figurines were recurringly female and constructed the fanciful myth of a primordial Neolithic Goddess. Contemporary practice instead rejects interpretive leaps across contexts. Dr Lesure offers a middle path: a new framework for assessing the relevance of particular comparisons. He develops the argument in case studies that consider figurines from Paleolithic Europe, the Neolithic Near East and Formative Mesoamerica.

Prehistoric rock art is the markings paintings, engravings, or pecked images left on rocks or cave walls by ancient peoples. In this book, Paul G. Bahn provides a richly illustrated overview of prehistoric rock art and cave art from around the world. Summarizing the recent advances in our understanding of this extraordinary visual record, he discusses new discoveries, new approaches to recording and interpretation, and current problems in conservation. Bahn focuses in particular on current issues in the interpretation of rock art, notably the shamanic interpretation that has been influential in recent years and that he refutes. This book is based on the Rhind Lectures that the author delivered for the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 2006."

Signalling and Performance: Ancient Rock Art in Britain and Ireland presents a state of the art survey of the ancient rock art of Britain and Ireland, bringing together new discoveries and new interpretations. Ancient rock art offers unique insights into the mindsets of its makers and the landscapes in which they lived. The making of rock art was not just an aesthetic practice, but an activity informed by deep social and cultural meanings held by its makers - meanings that they were compelled to express on rocks in Britain and Ireland, through mostly abstract images, for thousands of years. For a long time, ancient rock art remained a topic on the fringes of Archaeology. Since the 1960s, however, there has been sustained recording and research into ancient rock art. Increased publicity has evoked growing interest in British and Irish rock art, with professional and amateur archaeologists and the public, with the latter being responsible for many discoveries. In 2007, Aron Mazel, George Nash and Clive Waddington published the first edited volume focusing on ancient British rock art, entitled Art as Metaphor. Since then, there have been a number of publications covering this topic. Building on the increased interest in rock art, this lavishly illustrated volume constructed of thirteen thought-provoking chapters and an Introduction will do much to further enhance of understanding of this fascinating and meaningful resource. It will further establish ancient British and Irish rock art as a significant archaeological assemblage worthy of attention and additional study.

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.

This new history of over 5000 years of African art reveals its true diversity for the first time. Challenging centuries of misconceptions that have obscured the sophisticated nature of African art, Peter Garlake uses the latest research and archaeological findings to offer exciting new insights.

Presented to Stan Beckensall on his 90th birthday, this diverse and stimulating collection of papers celebrates his crucial contribution to rock art studies, and also looks to the future. It should be of value to students of prehistoric Britain and Ireland, and anyone with an interest in rock art, for many decades to come. Stan has done a phenomenal amount of work over recent decades, on an entirely amateur basis, discovering, recording and interpreting Atlantic rock art ('cup-and-ring marks') in his home county of Northumberland and elsewhere. Much of this work was done in the 1970s and 1980s when the subject, now increasingly regarded as mainstream within Neolithic studies, was largely shunned by professional archaeologists. Anyone with an interest in rock art is greatly indebted to Stan, not only for his work and his wisdom, so graciously shared, but also, as the contributors to this volume make clear, for the inspiration he has provided, and continues to provide, for work undertaken by others.