Iconographic Method in New World Prehistory.

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Cover; ICONOGRAPHIC METHOD IN NEW WORLD PREHISTORY; Title; Copyright; Contents; Illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgments; CHAPTER 1 Preliminaries: An Iconography of Prehistoric Images; The Domain of Iconography; Is an Iconography of Prehistoric Objects Possible?; Character of the Work; Prehistoric Iconography as Cognitive Archaeology; CHAPTER 2 Style; Definitions of Style; Models Governing the Formal Properties of Images; Models Governing the Execution of Images; Models Governing the Significance of Referents; Models Governing the Correct Reading of Referents; "Naturalism" of Style.

Engagement of Style and Subject MatterMethod of Study; Assembly of the Corpus; Organization of the Corpus by Genre; Chronological Organization of the Corpus; Categories of Stylistic Canons; 1. Genres; 2. Media; 3. Decorative Effects; 4. Layout; 5. Use of Positive and Negative Space; 6. Scale; 7. Relative Size; 8. Depth Cues in Two-Dimensional Representation; 9. Conventions of Perspective and Proportion; 10. Dimensionality; 11. Degree of Elaboration; 12. Aesthetic Quality; How Style Informs Iconography; What Is What?; What Is Contemporaneous with What?; What Is Local?

CHAPTER 3 Form and ReferentStyle and Meaning; "It Seems to Me" Iconography; The Problem of Analytical Distance; Recognition of Natural Prototypes; Reductive Style Systems and Their Referents; Disjunction; The Primacy of Genres in Reference; Referents at Personal and Collective Scales; Reference and Ornament; CHAPTER 4 Configurational Analysis; Where to Begin?; Units of Form or of Reference?; Analytical Procedures; Suprastylistic Analytical Concepts; Compositions, Larger Compositional Configurations, and Subcompositional Elements; Visual Themes; Salient and Nonsalient Features.

Discrete and Nondiscrete Salient FeaturesMotifs; Identifying and Classifying Attributes; Ideographs; Filler Motifs; Narratives and the Passage of Time; The Problem of Shifting Frames of Reference; Describing Configurations; On Naming Motifs and Themes; Limits of Configurational Analysis; CHAPTER 5 Ethnographic Analogy; Distinct Roles of Analogy; General Comparative Analogy; Historical Homology; Proximity in Time; Breadth of the Comparative Base; Goodness of Fit; Generative Quality; The Direct Historical Approach; The Role of Cognates; Disjunction and the Social Contexts of Production.

Myth as a Source of Iconographic InterpretationMastery of the Ethnographic Sources; The Status of Ethnographically Informed Iconographic Models; Constructing and Testing an Iconographic Model; CHAPTER 6 The Logic of Iconographic Method in Prehistory; An Ordered Approach to Prehistoric Iconography; 1. Assembly of the Corpus; 2. Stylistic Analysis; 3. Incorporation of Natural History and Archaeological Field Data; 4. Configurational Analysis of Suprastylistic Formal Units; 5. Application of Ethnographic Analogy; 6. Building Iconographic Models; 7. Testing Iconographic Models.

Ways of Getting It Wrong.

This book offers an overview of iconographic methods and their application to archaeological analysis.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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