Dr. Ben Alberti

(Framingham State University)

Image Predation:

In Archaic Northern New Mexico

November 21, 2025

4:30-5:30 pm (with reception to follow)

951 Schermerhorn Extension

Abstract

What the concept “image” is in archaeology affects what work images do. James Elkins has written that usage of “image” is so broad that any list of its meanings risks incoherence. Most often, the concept is not interrogated. But sometimes it is. In this talk, two issues are examined: how we think about the agency of images; and whether it matters where our concept of “image” comes from. Alfred Gell theorized images (artworks) as secondary agents, often operating as perceptual/cognitive traps. Sev Fowles and Darryl Wilkinson argue that images can be “captured” and repurposed in acts of domination. Among some Amerindian groups, the “soul” is the image of the living person able to capture or be captured. This is, perhaps, a stronger claim than Fowles or Wilkinson, as is W.J.T Mitchell’s, that images (pictures) want and need independently of their human authors.

My interest is not in theories of images, however, but in what can be said about the Archaic rock art of northern New Mexico. The art divides into two basic types, animal prints and abstract dots, lines, and squiggles. An image concept that works to understand why this is so must respond to what we know of the image setting, the coming together of human hunter-gatherers and non-human agencies. Traps, tracking, tools, movement, and forms of life inform image logics “then and there” and are fed by them. In addition to asking what images do (for us) or what they want (for themselves), a “predatory” image concept asks what labor it can do when agency is shifted away from things or people and towards the work done by the images themselves.

Dr. Michelle Young

(American Museum of Natural History) 

“Mastery on the Move: Mobile Specialists and the Making of the Chavín Phenomenon”

Friday, December 5, 4:10 PM to 6:10 PM

951 Schermerhorn Extension

Register Here

Please note that campus access is restricted for those not affiliated with Columbia University. Although registration will remain open until the time of the event, unaffiliated visitors are strongly encouraged to register by 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 4 to ensure timely access to campus. A QR code for entry will be sent via email after 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 4. For any questions or concerns, please contact the Center for Archaeology at the address below.

Abstract

Chavín was once considered the earliest civilization in the Central Andes. Today it is recognized as a widespread cultural, artistic, and/or religious phenomenon that developed in the Peru between 850 and 550 BCE. This phenomenon is identified primarily through shared material patterns of temple construction, iconography, and ceramics. The intensification of long-distance trade and the development and spread of new craft technologies also suggest that this period was one of widespread cooperation and interaction. This talk will reconsider previous approaches to the study of the Chavín Phenomenon – as a mother culture, horizon style, and complex society – to demonstrate how epistemic artefacts from culture-history and neoevolutionary schemas have limited archaeologists’ ability to interpret the Chavín phenomenon into the present. An exploration of archaeological evidence from the Chavín center of Atalla, located in the highlands of Huancavelica, Peru, produces a vision of the Chavín Phenomenon as the result of pericentric and translocal processes. This new framing highlights the agency of mobile artisans and ritual specialists in the creation of a dynamic and interconnected Andean World.

Matthew Delvaux
(Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College)
“Colors of the Viking Age”
January 22, 2026
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Fayerweather Hall, Room 513

Register Here