Understanding Visual Culture Without Textual Sources: What Are the Possibilities for Analysis?

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.