The Archaeology of Art: Materials, Practices, Affects. Andrew Meirion Jones and Andrew Cochrane. 2018. Routledge, London. xiii + 223pp. $160.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-13891-360-8. $46.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-13891-359-2. $46.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-31569-134-3.

Abstract

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...