The Archaeology of Art: Materials, Practices, Affects seeks to provide ways of exploring ancient art in novel ways that eschew the traditional approaches taken from art history and anthropology. These traditional approaches, which concentrate on representation, meaning, communication, and identity, are often problematic because we lack sufficient information on the history and the sociocultural context of ancient art. Furthermore, we are often unable to identify what we are looking at, especially when dealing with nonfigurative images. How then to deduce meanings from such images? Unfortunately, these circumstances have often curtailed the study of ancient art or led to fanciful or overarching interpretations.
Andrew Meirion Jones and Andrew Cochrane remain optimistic and propose ways of looking at, thinking about, and experiencing ancient art by focusing on materials, practices, and affects. As archaeologists, we work with materials that are used to make art and that influence how art objects will be made, used, and discarded. Materials (stone, wood, clay, ivory, pigment, and rock surface) are not inert substances but participate in the process of creation of art and our experience of art. Practices that surround art include its making, displaying, assembling, disassembling, and destroying or depositing: art is process based. It is steeped in experience, and artworks are continually participating in the relational flow in which new affects—the effects that objects or practices have on their beholders—are generated. Akin to agency, an affect is the potentiality in an action, the forces of an encounter, the impact that shapes experiences.
The 12 chapters in this book (most of which were written by Jones) encompass a broad geographical and temporal range of case studies. The varied examples include Finnish, northern Scandinavian, Comanche and Chumash rock art, European and Australian cave art, the Chinese terracotta army, Japanese dogū figurines, Olmec figurines from sites in Mexico, gigantic engravings from Chavín de Huántar in Peru, Upper Paleolithic mammoth ivory beads from Europe, Iron Age torcs, Pueblo and Inka architecture, passage tomb art of Ireland, and the so-called Folkton drums of the British Neolithic.
The first two chapters introduce the themes, approaches, and definitions used in the book. The authors provide an overview of how art has been studied and conceived by art historians, anthropologists, and philosophers of art and how archaeologists have mostly adapted these disciplines’ approaches to topics such as meaning and style. Jones and Cochrane advocate for approaches that take into account contemporary practicing artists and their reflections on the properties of materials and on art as process. The authors argue that art and images are not static and that studying art and images as part of active assemblages, instead of static contexts, is essential for understanding the roles that art plays in building and maintaining social relationships among people. Focusing on the engagement between people and active materials, and their co-constitutive intra-actions, will shed light on the affects generated and the relational encounters in which art participated.
The following chapters explore the practices involved in making, assembling, and disassembling art. Chapter 3 examines gesture, which highlights the importance of touch and performance in the act of making art and that can be explored through the notions of chaîne opératoire and technical style. Chapter 4 discusses experimentation, performance, and improvisation that are inherently present in the making of art and depend on the intra-actions between artists and the materials employed, the art's intended performative functions, and reliance on previous material forms. Chapter 5 considers issues of scale and art ranging from miniatures to gigantic images that invite different relational intra-actions through visual and tactile engagement, such as manipulation and touching, feelings of overawe, and oscillating perspective. Chapter 6 examines color and light, which generate diverse affects through their changing nature and the sensuous qualities of their associated materials, such as luster or translucence. Chapter 7 explores the assembly and disassembly of art such as breakage, fragmentation, and reconstruction that are generative of new images and that can be examined through the process of assemblage. Assemblages are further explored in Chapter 8, where the authors propose to move away from style as predetermined and functional to style as assemblage: fluid and dependent on materials, techniques, technologies, and social factors. Such assemblages, when re-created, become styles. Chapter 9 delves into the meaning and analysis of semiotics and highlights both the importance of matter in that eternal quest and meaning's fluid nature. Chapter 10 provides a lengthy case study of Neolithic art in Ireland and Britain and discusses the importance of materials and the flexible nature of art, whereas Chapter 11 advocates for the use of new digital technologies in the study of old art that can reveal further clues about past artistic practices such as improvisation and reworking. The last chapter pleads the case of fluid images studied beyond representation while considering their materiality and their continuous changes over time from emergence to discard or permanence. Ultimately, the book advocates for an ontology of images because they shape ontologies, realities, and experiences.
The book highlights larger questions about art and ontology that Jones has been exploring for some time now and that have been popular in rock art studies in the past decade. The call for the inclusion of modern artists’ reflections on art is refreshing, although it is disappointing that only Western European artists are invoked in a book that examines ancient art on a global scale. Although we should free ourselves from the shackles of modern Western conceptions of art to study ancient art (as this book advocates), the inclusion of diverse voices from around the world would help further dismantle the authoritative aura of Western art. The book is accessible and devoid of unnecessary jargon, and it provides concrete examples that can guide future explorations of (ancient) art.
Overall, the book should be of interest not only to those who study ancient art but also to anyone interested in material culture and its importance in our lives. Those who would like to engage in more explorations of art and images should check out Images in the Making: Art, Process, Archaeology (2020, Manchester University Press), coedited by Ing-Marie Back Danielsson and Andrew Meirion Jones, for further musings on the dynamic nature of images.
