“Peter Wells adopts an entirely new approach to the later centuries of European prehistory. He opens our eyes to the way in which Bronze Age and Iron Age people viewed their world, drawing on current work in material culture studies to present us with a dynamic picture of the visual life of late prehistory. This book will revolutionize the way we think about the Iron Age.”–Anthony Harding, University of Exeter

“We think it modern to be trapped in an impersonal world by the convenience of mass-produced commodities, yearning for the individual crafts and communities that graced an earlier, more human era. In his new book on the visual experiences and perceptions of pre-Roman societies in central and western Europe, Peter Wells teaches us that this dilemma is not uniquely modern; it has happened before. In fact before the Roman Empire expanded into northwestern Europe the people of regions far beyond the empire had surrendered an economy of individualizing crafts to mass production, preparing themselves materially for their eventual military conquest. How Ancient Europeans Saw the World is an intriguing book that attempts to revisualize swords and brooches, tombs and public spaces, borrowing cues from marketing research and art history to reconstruct how things appeared to the people who made and used them. It deserves a wide readership”–David W. Anthony, author of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“This is a remarkable piece of scholarship. Wells takes the discussion of prehistoric Europe’s complex material culture back to first principles, along the way shedding much of the interpretive baggage of several previous generations of scholars. He also provides an example of how an archaeological topic can be approached with clarity and logic. This book will arouse controversy and debate.”–Peter Bogucki, author of The Origins of Human Society

“This is a most important book. Wells argues that after 200 BC Eurasia moved generally toward the mass production and consumption of artifacts and that this changed people’s relationships with the world, in turn altering the nature of experience. How Ancient Europeans Saw the World is thought-provoking and provocative.”–Chris Gosden, author of Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction

Peter S. Wells is professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. His many books include Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered and The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton).

HOW ANCIENT EUROPEANS SAW THE WORLD

Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric TimesBy PETER S. WELLS

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14338-5

Contents

List of Illustrations……………………………………………………………..viiPreface………………………………………………………………………….xiAcknowledgments…………………………………………………………………..xviiChapter 1: Of Monsters and Flowers………………………………………………….1Chapter 2: Seeing and Shaping Objects……………………………………………….18Chapter 3: The Visual Worlds of Early Europe…………………………………………34Chapter 4: Frame, Focus, Visualization………………………………………………52Chapter 5: Pottery: The Visual Ecology of the Everyday………………………………..72Chapter 6: Attraction and Enchantment: Fibulae……………………………………….99Chapter 7: Status and Violence: Swords and Scabbards………………………………….112Chapter 8: Arranging Spaces: Objects in Graves……………………………………….131Chapter 9: Performances: Objects and Bodies in Motion…………………………………155Chapter 10: New Media in the Late Iron Age: Coins and Writing………………………….176Chapter 11: Changing Patterns in Objects and in Perception…………………………….188Chapter 12: Contacts, Commerce, and the Dynamics of New Visual Patterns…………………200Chapter 13: The Visuality of Objects, Past and Present………………………………..222Bibliographic Essay……………………………………………………………….231References Cited………………………………………………………………….249Index……………………………………………………………………………281

Chapter One

OF MONSTERS AND FLOWERS

A NEW STYLE FOR IRON AGE EUROPE

A dramatic new style of imagery appeared in Europe twenty-five hundred years ago (Figure 1). Strange creatures, part human, part beast, were crafted onto gold and bronze jewelry and cast onto the handles and lids of bronze vessels. Metalsmiths created lush new forms of decoration—incised and relief ornament based on floral motifs such as leaves and petals, with spirals, S-curves, and whirligigs decorating objects ranging from pottery to sword scabbards.

This style was a radical departure from the forms of representation and decoration that preceded it. Throughout the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, representations of humans and animals had been rare, and those few that existed tended to be simple and naturalistic. There was no mistaking a water-bird or a stag for any other creature—their simple attributes made plain what animal was intended. Linear ornament was geometric, based on rectangles, rhomboids, triangles, and circles.

The reasons for the appearance of the new style, named La Tene after a site in western Switzerland, have been the source of endless controversy since the latter half of the nineteenth century. At that time archaeologists decided to divide the European Iron Age into an earlier stage called the “Hallstatt Period” (800–400 BC), after the great cemetery discovered at Hallstatt in Upper Austria, and a later stage designated the “La Tene Period” (from 400 BC to the Roman conquests), after the lakeshore site near Neuchatel in Switzerland, where large numbers of metal objects, especially iron swords and their scabbards, had been found (see map, Figure 2). Debate has been dominated by two main questions. What was the source of the new style? And how was the new style related to social and political changes evident in the richly outfitted burials of the fifth century BC, with their gold rings, imported Greek and Etruscan bronzes, and ornate chariots?

Discussion of the first question has revolved around identifying motifs and forms in the art and design traditions known as Greek, Scythian, and Etruscan that might have provided models for the new style in temperate Europe. Debate on the second question has explored the connections between the appearance of the new style and the decline in power of the centers of the sixth and early fifth centuries BC that were associated with the earlier Hallstatt style. These centers include the Heuneburg in southwest Germany, Mont Lassois in eastern France, Chatillon-sur-Glane in Switzerland, Zavist in Bohemia, and the Hellbrunnerberg in Austria, all of which thrived at the end of the sixth century BC and in the first decades of the fifth, and then fell into decline and abandonment in the middle years of that latter century.

My approach in this book is different. My principal concern with the new style of imagery and ornament is not where it came from or how it was connected to “dynasty change” during the European Iron Age. It is rather what the new style can tell us about how people’s ways of seeing, their visual perception, changed during the fifth century BC. As I argue below, this topic is not only of interest in its own right, but bears directly on our understanding of who we are today and how we got that way.

I began this chapter with this brief discussion of the new style that emerged during the fifth century BC, but my theme is much broader.

WRITTEN HISTORY AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF OBJECTS

Our understanding of the immediate past—of the past few weeks or even the past few decades—depends upon our personal experience, including our interactions with other individuals, our reading, and the news that we may watch on TV or on the Internet. Understanding the more distant past—beyond a few decades—depends in large part on “history”; that is, on written (or filmed) accounts of what happened longer ago. But written history can take us back only so far. In North America north of Mexico, written texts take us back only as far as the end of the fifteenth century, when the first Europeans arrived. In Mesoamerica, written texts go back considerably further, at least to the beginnings of Classic Maya civilization in the third century AD. An earlier system of signs was used at Monte Alban (around 500 BC), and perhaps as far back as the Olmec culture, around 1000 BC (there is no consensus as yet as to whether or not the Olmec had writing). In Britain, the earliest writing (in Latin) appeared on local coinage of the latter half of the final century BC. In continental temperate Europe north of the Mediterranean Sea, there is early evidence of writing before the Roman conquest, but it is all in Greek or Latin script, and the inscriptions do not constitute anything that we would call history. In the Mediterranean, the alphabetic scripts of Greece, Etruria, and Rome developed during the first half of the first millennium BC. Linear B script in Greece emerged around the fourteenth century BC. Writing had begun at least by the time of the Shang Bronze Age in China, around the sixteenth century BC, and in the Indus Valley region of southern Asia, around the twenty-sixth century BC. The earliest signs that most scholars accept as writing developed in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, in both cases around the thirty-third century BC. But in both those cases, it was not until about seven centuries later that texts appeared that we might consider actual “history”—accounts of events and of rulers’ lives. For much of the world— South America, Africa south of Nubia, northern Asia, North America north of Mexico, the Pacific islands—what we understand as writing was first introduced by merchants and explorers from outside.

While history in this sense of written documents takes us back only a few centuries in most of the world (or at most a few millennia), the techniques of archaeology provide us with ways of learning about human actions, practices, and behaviors all the way back to the time of the earliest datable products of human activity, stone tools manufactured 2.6 million years ago. Just as the earliest texts do not provide much information from which we can write history, the earliest archaeological materials do not allow us to say very much about human behaviors or practices. But from later periods in human development, we often have access to rich sources of information in the form of physical evidence, as from Bronze and Iron Age Europe. I define “archaeological materials” here as any objects shaped or arranged by humans. These include tools made of stone, bone, copper, bronze, and iron; ornaments of shell, silver, and gold; pottery; textiles; wheeled vehicles; walls around settlements; graves; ditches—anything that humans have made.

The aspect of the past that constitutes the focus of this book is visual perception—how people saw in the past, compared to how we see today. “We” is not as simple as it might seem. We tend to assume that everyone perceives things as we do. But already in 1912, the American psychologist William James raised the question, can two different individuals perceive in exactly the same way. And indeed between two individuals raised in very different environments—one in a modern Western city and the other in a Bronze Age house in France, say—differences in perception are likely to be substantial.

UNDERSTANDING THE PAST

There is a general tendency in our society, as in all societies, to interpret objects from the past in terms of objects with which we are familiar. If we see an Early Bronze Age bracelet in a museum, we think about the bracelets that people in our own society wear and assume that the ancient bracelet served the same purpose. We read Caesar’s description of the peoples of Gaul as if they were modern newspaper reports or magazine stories about peoples with different customs from our own. We look at a seventeenth-century painting by de Hooch showing the inside of a house, with furniture and people in it, and transpose ourselves into that house and imagine what it would be like to live there. In the case of all of these reactions, we assume that we understand the object, the story, and the scene, because they all seem familiar. They look and read like things that we know about from our daily lives, and we have no reason to suspect that understanding them is any more complicated than understanding how a bracelet that we buy in a jewelry store should be worn, how to read a story in National Geographic, or how to interpret a photograph of a living-room setting in an interior design advertisement. But just because things look familiar, we cannot safely assume that we can understand them, without considering the context in which they occur.

But the matter is yet more complicated. People who lived in the Early Bronze Age, who led Roman armies against the inhabitants of France, or who lived in seventeenth-century Holland all inhabited worlds different from ours. A bracelet meant one thing in 1800 BC; a bracelet today can mean something quite different. Caesar saw the Iron Age peoples of Europe through the eyes of a wealthy and powerful member of Roman society. Dutch genre painters of the seventeenth century were conveying specific social and political messages with their paintings of house interiors. In each case, there is a great deal of background information that we need to know about the Early Bronze Age, about elite Roman attitudes toward other peoples, and about ideology and politics in seventeenth-century Holland if we are to understand what these things meant to the people who created them and to those who experienced them.

In order to get some understanding of the past, an appreciation of how people lived and what they experienced, and to better understand objects that survive from the past (paintings, sculpture, buildings, pottery, brooches …), we need to take account of how peoples’ experience in the past was different from ours today. It is all too easy to visit a reconstructed house at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, for example, or the reconstructed medieval village of West Stow in southern England, and think “they must have been so uncomfortable living in such small houses,” or “how could they possibly see with no big glassed windows and no electric lights.” In thinking this way, we imagine putting ourselves, with our experiences and our knowledge of our own world, into the physical situation we see before us. But our experience and knowledge are profoundly different from theirs, the peoples who lived in the situation we are imagining.

We know that the experiences of people in ages past were different from ours, but the only intellectual tools that we can bring to examine and study those experiences are our minds of today. In this sense, we can never really experience what things were like in the past. But there are ways that we can get closer to a sense of what they were like. One way is to read what people have written about the worlds they inhabited. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories, we get a feel for what life was like in nineteenth-century New England. Samuel Pepys helps us to understand London during the seventeenth century. Pliny the Elder gives us an idea of what the Roman Mediterranean world was like in the first century AD. Of course, their writings express their personal points of view, and they may be consciously representing things in a way favorable to them. Certainly, no individual can ever represent more than the fraction of the society and experience with which he or she is familiar. Even the meanings of words change over time, so that a word that Pepys used may have a different meaning or a different connotation today, and when it comes to translations from another language, matters are of course even more complex. For the most part, texts expose us only to the perspectives of elite members of society. But we can nonetheless learn a great deal about living conditions, the physical realities of life, values, attitudes, beliefs, aspirations, and much else from writers who set their stories in the times in which they lived. Charles Dickens is a prime example, since much of our understanding of life in mid-nineteenth century Britain comes from his descriptions of conditions in his time.

Visual representations are another important source. From paintings, drawings, and photographs, we can glean information about conditions and lifestyles of the past. Jacob Riis’s photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are an important source of information about society and economy in New York City. James Fenton’s photographs of mid-nineteenth-century England provide information about the character of the English countryside and about architecture, while his photographs from the Crimea show what the results of war really looked like. Landscape paintings by Rubens, van Ruisdael, and Constable inform us about agriculture, forestry, settlement patterns, and economy in early modern Europe. In Egypt and Mesopotamia we can study scenes going back some five thousand years to see how painters, sculptors, and other artisans represented the worlds in which they lived. As with written texts, we need to approach pictorial representations critically if we are to gain real insight into what they can tell us. Paintings and drawings are artists’ creations, not objective representations of reality. Even photographs have never been as straightforward and objective as some people think—and this was true even before the possibilities of Photoshop. Yet despite such shortcomings, these sources of information are important for understanding the past.

We can also use nonverbal and nonpictorial objects from the past to help us to understand peoples’ perceptions, practices, and experiences. Every manufactured object embodies essential features of the society that produced it, and the more complex the object, the more information we should be able to derive from it. As I shall argue in this book, objects played a much greater role in communication and expression in societies that do not have writing than in societies that do. Howard Morphy speaks of the “multidimensional nature of objects,” and the myriad ways in which they can communicate meanings. As Jan Mukarovsky has argued for art objects in particular (but the same is true of all crafted items), every object can be viewed as possessing two essential aspects: the basic physical thing, and the meanings that the object embodies in the unique cultural context in which it was produced. Chapter 11 treats this topic in some detail.

DIFFERENT VISUAL WORLDS

People who lived in Europe between four thousand and two thousand years ago inhabited a different world from that of today. Though they were physically very much like us, and presumably psychologically similar as well, and although the landscape and climate were not very different either, their material culture was unlike ours in fundamental ways. Most importantly, they had far fewer objects than we have. There simply was not as much stuff around. Where the typical modern American or European might have a kitchen with several hundred plates, glasses, and pieces of cutlery, a typical Iron Age European might have had five or ten ceramic containers at any one time. A modern American might have a tool chest containing fifty or a hundred tools, while his or her Iron Age counterpart had perhaps two or three, depending upon whether that individual was a craftsworker or a farmer. A modern American or British individual might own fifty to a hundred pieces of jewelry, an Iron Age person perhaps two or three. And there are many categories of things that we own that did not even exist in the Bronze and Iron Ages—cars, kitchen appliances, sports equipment, “collectibles.”

An implication of this difference is that the typical object means less to us today than an individual object would have meant to the person who owned it in late prehistoric Europe. And, as we shall see, objects that we might consider trash were valued by prehistoric people. Moreover, as many investigators have argued, objects had much greater significance to people who did not possess a system of writing, because they were means of communicating a whole range of kinds of information that writing communicates in literate societies.

OBJECTS IN TIMES BEFORE WRITING

This book is a study of a two-thousand-year period in Europe (Figure 3) from which we have vast quantities of material for study and analysis, but with which the great majority of people today are not very familiar. This period, from 2000 BC to the Roman conquests during the last century BC and the first century AD, is known by the terms “Bronze Age” and “Iron Age,” names devised by archaeologists during the nineteenth century, when the discipline of archaeology was first becoming systematic in its approaches to understanding the past. From these millennia we have large collections of pottery, jewelry, tools, weapons, metal vessels, wagons, horse harness ornaments, farming implements, and kitchen utensils, as well as rich documentation of settlements, cemeteries, and other places of human activity. Museums all over Europe offer rich and informative displays of objects from local cultures of the period. Reconstructed settlements are accessible to the public as open-air museums, often with costumed performers demonstrating how pottery was made, how bronze was cast, and how food was prepared. Thousands of publications illustrate and discuss material from the Bronze and Iron Ages, ranging from detailed reports on new discoveries and excavations to glossy coffee-table books with photographs of the most stunning prehistoric objects.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from HOW ANCIENT EUROPEANS SAW THE WORLDby PETER S. WELLS Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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