Prof. Severin Fowles
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University

Neolithic Metapictures of the American Southwest

Friday April 24th, 4.10pm on Zoom – details below

As in many parts of the world, the Neolithic of the American Southwest was an artistic revolution no less than an economic revolution. After millennia of image production by foragers who had, at best, a deeply ambivalent relationship with the depiction of the human form—and, indeed, with the depiction of bodies generally—Ancestral Pueblo farmers rushed headlong into a new world of bodily figuration. Within a few generations of the first agricultural villages, the Southwestern landscape was already cluttered with rock art depictions of anthropomorphic beings: head-to-toe human forms, stylized human masks, strange human-animal hybrids, and the like. So, too, did anthropomorphism find a home in sculptural media, architectural murals, and painted pottery. These new images raise obvious iconographical questions about the revolutionary content of agricultural art. But they also prompt us to consider deeper iconological issues having to do with the status of the Ancestral Pueblo image itself. This paper addresses the latter through a consideration of metapictures, or self-conscious pictures of pictures, arguing that such images reveal not just the new logics of Neolithic art but also new subjectivities of Neolithic artists in the region. The paper ends with the proposition that the emergence of metapictures marks a critical threshold in the history of image production worthy of study on a global scale.

To participate please email archaeology@columbia.edu with your full name, phone number and email address.

We will send you the Zoom meeting ID and password 30 minutes before the presentation. If you already have login details from last week’s salon, they may also be used for this one.