Timeline and Breadth of Prehistoric Visual Representation
While art historians are clearly interested in some of the same objects and processes, visual anthropology places these artifacts within a holistic cultural context. Archaeologists, in particular, use phases of visual development to try to understand the spread of humans and their cultures across contiguous landscapes as well as over larger areas. By 10,000 BP, a system of well-developed pictographs was in use by boating peoples and was likely instrumental in the development of navigation and writing, as well as a medium of story telling and artistic representation. Early visual representations often show the female form, with clothing appearing on the female body around 28,000 BP, which archaeologists know now corresponds with the invention of weaving in Old Europe. This is an example of the holistic nature of visual anthropology: a figurine depicting a woman wearing diaphanous clothing is not merely an object of art, but a window into the customs of dress at the time, household organization (where they are found), transfer of materials (where the clay came from) and processes (when did firing clay become common), when did weaving begin, what kind of weaving is depicted and what other evidence is there for weaving, and what kinds of cultural changes were occurring in other parts of human life at the time.
Visual anthropology, by focusing on its own efforts to make and understand film, is able to establish many principles and build theories about human visual representation in general.
Read more about this topic: Visual Anthropology
Famous quotes containing the words breadth, prehistoric and/or visual:
“And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of
Glynn
Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore
When length was failure, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,
And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain
Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain,—
Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face
The vast sweet visage of space.”
—Sidney Lanier (1842–1881)
“Of course
the New Testament is very small.
Its mouth opens four times
as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster,
yet somehow man-made....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“For women ... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can’t possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman’s body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)