Archaeologies of Art

This international volume draws together key research that examines visual arts of the past and contemporary indigenous societies. Placing each art style in its temporal and geographic context, the contributors show how depictions represent social mechanisms of identity construction, and how stylistic differences in product and process serve to reinforce cultural identity. Examples stretch from the Paleolithic to contemporary world and include rock art, body art, and portable arts. Ethnographic studies of contemporary art production and use, such as among contemporary Aboriginal groups, are included to help illuminate artistic practices and meanings in the past. The volume reflects the diversity of approaches used by archaeologists to incorporate visual arts into their analysis of past cultures and should be of great value to archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians. Sponsored by the World Archaeological Congress.

Author Biography

Ines Domingo Sanz is postdoctoral fellow at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia), supported by an “Excellence Post-doctoral Fellowship” from the Generalitat Valenciana. She is Graduate (1998) and Doctor in History (2005) by the Universitat de Valencia (Spain) (with an area of expertise in Prehistory and Archaeology), where she was awarded with the Doctorate Extraordinary Award in 2006. Her research in Australia focuses on the territorial and social aspects of Indigenous rock art from Arnhem Land. In Spain she focuses on style and digital recording of Levantine rock art. Danae Fiore is a full-time researcher at CONICET (National Council of Scientific Research, Argentina), and a part-time lecturer at UBA (Universidad de Buenos Aires). Her main research interests are centred in the analysis of rock art, portable art and body art through technical, socio-economic, and visual-cognitive perspectives. She completed an MA and a PhD in Archaeology at University College London and published several papers in peer-reviewed journals in Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Great Britain, Italy, Chile, and the United States. She has recently co-edited (with M.M. Podesta) a book on rock art production and uses: “Tramas en la Piedra. Produccion y usos del arte rupestre” (jointly published by WAC and AINA, 2006). Her current research topics relate to decoration of bone artefacts from sites from Tierra del Fuego and rock art techniques and motifs in Patagonia. Sally K. May is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Flinders University of South Australia. She has worked with the Kunbarlanja community in western Arnhem Land for 6 years and with them initiated a variety of projects including the collection of oral histories and the Injalak Hill Rock Art Recording Project. Sally has published on scientific expeditions to Arnhem Land, museum collections, and repatriation. Sally received her PhD from the Australian National University in 2006.