Peter S. Wells, How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Visions, Patterns and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times

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Notes

1. Building on his earlier work, Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and idem, Image and Response in Early Europe (London: Duckworth, 2008).

2. For a celebrated art historical narrative of Celtic art, see Ruth Megaw and Vincent Megaw Celtic Art: From Its Beginnings to the Book of Kells (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989). Critical responses from archaeology include Duncan Garrow, Chris Gosden, and J. D. Hill, eds., Rethinking Celtic Art (Oxford: Oxbow, 2008).

3. Orthodox discussions of Celtic art include P. Jacobsthal, Early Celtic Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944); and J. V. S. Megaw, The Art of the European Iron Age (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1970). The quotation is from Sam Smiles and Stephanie Moser, eds., Envisioning the Past: Archeology and the Image (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 3.

4. On the construction of the Celts, see, for example, John Collis, “Celtic Myths,” Antiquity 71 (1997): 195–201; Simon James, The Atlantic Celts (London: British Museum, 1999); and Peter S. Wells, Beyond Celts, Germans and Scythians: Archeology and Identity in Iron Age Europe (London: Duckworth, 2001). For alternative perspectives, see Ruth Megaw and Vincent Megaw, “Ancient Celts and Modern Ethnicity,” Antiquity 70 (1996): 175–81; and Barry Cunliffe, “A Race Apart: Insularity and Connectivity,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 75 (2009): 55–64.

5. For critical examination of “style,” see, for example, Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); of the origins of art, see Thomas A. Dowson, “Rock Art: Handmaiden to Studies of Cognitive Evolution,” in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archeology of Symbolic Storage, ed. Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre (Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs, 1998), 67–76; and of “culture,” see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

6. James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1966); idem, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1979); and Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

7. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

8. John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

9. See also Jody Joy, “Fancy Objects in the British Iron Age: Why Decorate?” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 77 (2011): 205–29.

10. John Creighton, “Visions of Power: Imagery and Symbols in Late Iron Age Britain,” Britannia 26 (1995): 285–301; and idem, Coins and Power in Late Iron Age Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

11. For a critical discussion of neuroscientific approaches to art, see, for example, Robert J. Wallis, “Animism and the Interpretation of Rock Art,” Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture 6, no. 1 (2013): 21–28; and idem, “Animism, Ancestors and Adjusted Styles of Communication: Hidden Art in Irish Passage Tombs,” in Archaeological Imaginations of Religion, ed. Thomas Meier and Petra Tillessen (Budapest: Archaeolingua, 2014), 283–314.

12. For discussion of areas such as these, see, for example, D. W. Harding, The Archeology of Celtic Art (London: Routledge, 2007); Jody Joy, “Reflections on Celtic Art: A Re-examination of Mirror Decoration,” in Rethinking Celtic Art, ed. Duncan Garrow, Chris Gosden, and J. D. Hill (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008), 78–99; Melanie Giles, “Seeing Red: The Aesthetics of Martial Objects in the British Isles and Irish Iron Age,” in ibid., 59–76; and Jody Joy, Iron Age Mirrors: A Biographical Approach (Oxford: British Archeological Reports, 2010).

13. The relevance of materiality to Celtic art is stated in Andy Jones, review of Technologies of Enchantment? Exploring Celtic Art: 400 BC to AD 100, by Duncan Garrow and Chris Gosden, Antiquity 87, no. 337 (2013): 928–29.

14. See, for example Miranda Aldhouse-Green, “Gender-Bending Images: Permeating Boundaries in Ancient European Iconography,” in A Permeability of Boundaries? New Approaches to the Archeology of Art, Religion and Folklore, ed. Robert J. Wallis and Kenneth Lymer (Oxford: British Archeological Reports, 2001), 19–29; idem, An Archeology of Images (London: Routledge, 2004); and Mark Pearce, “The Spirit of the Sword and Spear,” Cambridge Archeological Journal 23, no. 1 (2013): 55–67.

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Robert J. Wallis

Robert J. Wallis is professor of visual culture, associate dean of MA Programmes, and Convenor of the MA in Art History and Visual Culture in the School of Communications, Arts, and Social Sciences at Richmond University, the American University in London [School of Communications, Arts, and Social Sciences, Kensington Campus, Richmond University, 1 St. Alban's Grove, London W8 5PN, U.K.].