Understanding Visual Culture Without Textual Sources: What Are the Possibilities for Analysis?
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
This symposium addresses challenges for scholars who are committed to working directly with pre-Columbian materials. Today historical texts are scrutinized for epistemological, interpretative, and rhetorical import, but they may not be directly relevant to "pre"-Columbian culture due to disjunction and gaps between the dates of sources and visual culture. Recent publications and panels have addressed a general crisis in art history and, more specifically, the future of pre-Columbian art history. In many ways archaeology is a closer intellectual and temporal ally of pre-Columbian art history than are contact- and colonial-period art history; indeed, the fields share temporal frames and material objects, and seek to understand how societies operated at specific points in time. Archaeologists and art historians will discuss Native North America, Mesoamerica, and South America, and address analytical strategies that turn away from textual documentation and focus on theories of the object; ocular, auditory, and kinesthetic aspects of visual culture; the Spatial Turn; the broad reach of the Digital Humanities; and other avenues. Papers also address how developments in archaeology and art history speak back to larger debates about method and theory and what the two disciplines have to share around the joint problem of objects without texts.
Other Keywords
Landscape •
Placemaking •
Maya art •
figurines •
Ceramics •
Maya •
Mesoamerica •
Material Culture •
Interpretation •
Attribute Analysis
Geographic Keywords
Mesoamerica •
North America - Southwest •
South America •
Central America
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)
- Documents (8)
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Clothing the World in a Social Skin: Recognizing the Role of Materialities of Dressing and Metaphor in the Ancient North American Southwest (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Scholars have suggested that the process of dressing both animates and ascribes identities to inanimate things. During the thirteenth century, people in the Mesa Verde region of the North American Southwest conceptually dressed special structures, pottery, baskets, and even cotton garments in similar ways. These diverse media were often adorned with clothing depictions and woven textile designs, painted on a white clay-coated background. Grounded both physically and conceptually in bodily...
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Jaina Figurines: a text without a text? (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Most Maya figurines have traditionally been evaluated on the basis of style and facture, and more recently, on the basis of archaeological context, where possible, as at Motul de San José, Guatemala. But what about the dozens of Jaina figurines in the Mexican national collections? Is there a way to examine the figurines typically considered to be mothers, lovers, weavers, wanderers, or warriors, almost none of which bear inscriptions, in such a way as to reevaluate the sort of assumptions made...
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Materiality and Meaning in the Formative Gulf Lowlands (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
In Formative Mesoamerica the built environments of San Lorenzo and La Venta became unique topographic assemblages combining local and regional materials drawn from riverbeds, salt domes, nearby hills, and distant volcanic peaks. These sites can be viewed as microcosms of their regional landscapes, incorporating natural forms and geographic referents as a way to manifest elite authority over the natural and human worlds. Integrated into these architectural settings were large-scale sculptures...
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Pondering Prehistory, Texts, and Roads in Yucatan (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Roads in Yucatan, Mexico, were aesthetic, territorial, and communicative systems that both united and divided the landscape. I employ network theory, placemaking, and urban planning and landscape models to analyze Maya road systems at Yaxuna, Coba, Ek Balam, and Chichen Itza as site extensions, markers of identity, and ritual and commercial corridors. It may seem heretical for an art historian to abandon historical documents available for one’s arsenal for analysis. However, Gil Stein and others...
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Power, Placemaking, and the Production of Sacred and Political Landscapes at La Milpa North, Northwestern Belize (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Although ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources offer insights into the practices of producing political and sacred landscapes among contemporary and colonial era Maya, the scarcity and separation in time and space of written sources from most Classic period contexts complicates the examination of placemaking strategies in more ancient settings. In the near absence of written sources, landscapes, which are inscribed by built environments and the material remains of inhabitation, may be read as...
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The "Problem" in the Ecology of Images (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
In The Shape of Time (1962) George Kubler suggested that formal change results from a chain of solutions to problems that alter as the solutions accumulate. While this concept has been influential in studies on formal change, his notion of “problem” remains underdeveloped. This paper takes Kubler’s formulation of “problem” as a starting point for abducing meaning in works for which texts are lacking. By attending to the “problem” as the locus of dynamic change and the link to other social...
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Self-Referentiality on Mimbres Painted Bowls (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Drawing on George Kubler's theoretical treatise, The Shape of Time, as well as more recent epistemological reflections by art historians such as Georges Didi-Huberman and Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, this paper explores the potential for objects to contribute to their own interpretation. The imagery painted on Mimbres vessels often playfully responds to or incorporates their hemispherical shape. There are also instances where the imagery seems to resonate with the holes that were...
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Style and Substance in the Inca Imperial Capital: A Preliminary Archaeometric and Attribute Analysis of Ceramics, Materiality, and Aesthetics in Ancient Cusco (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Archaeologists have long examined how ancient empires and states developed a standard aesthetic and material culture—a set of styles and iconographic designs meant to express their claims to regional authority. In contrast, this paper moves beyond style designations and iconographic interpretations, which often draw on texts to make claims about representations of myths and political personages, to instead understand the materials and technological sequences that constituted a regional aesthetic...