ICONOGRAPHY WITHOUT TEXTS

Edited by Paul Taylor

Contributors to the conference held at the Warburg Institute in June 2005 were asked to consider the question: how, if at all, can we investigate the iconographic themes of cultures that have left us few or no textual records?  Some have responded directly while others have expanded the terms of debate but we hope that all the essays included in this book will be of interest to art historians, archaeologists and anthropologists who are faced with the problem of interpreting visual artefacts that have become divorced from the cultural contexts in which they once had meaning.

 

Paul G. Bahn: Holding onto Smoke? Wishful Thinking vs Common Sense in Rock Art Interpretation

Jean-Loïc Le Quellec: Can One ‘Read’ Rock Art? An Egyptian Example

Robert Bagley: Interpreting Prehistoric Designs

J. S. Cooper: Incongruent Corpora: Writing and Art in Ancient Iraq

John Baines: On Functions of Writing in Ancient Egyptian Pictorial Representation

Stephen Houstonand Karl Taube: Meaning in Early Maya Imagery

Paul Taylor: Moche Libation Bottles

Jerome Feldman: Hawaiian Petroglyphs as Narratives

Ivan Gaskell: Some Cherokee and Chitimacha Baskets: Problems of Interpretation

Illustration above: The Cave of the Beasts, ca 5000 BC. Gilf Kebîr, Egypt. Photo © Jean-Loïc LeQuellec.    

     
Preface, Introduction and Index

c.210 pp     110 black & white illustrations        2008              Price: £  40.00          
ISBN 978 0 85481 143 4          ISSN 1352-9986  

The Warburg Institute, London - Nino Aragno Editore, Turin