SPECIAL ISSUE

Art, Material Culture, Visual Culture, or Something Else

‘Art’ in Archaeology and Anthropology: An Overview of
the Concept

John Robb

The concept of art has proved controversial in archaeology and anthropology. Many feel that
the concept, developed to fit high art in modern Western society, is inappropriate for objects
made for other uses, in other times, or in other cultures. Yet there is no widely agreed critique
or alternative concept. This introduction reviews responses to this dilemma, ranging from
using the concept uncritically, using the term ‘art’ simply as an archaeological convenience
to refer to things such as petroglyphs and figurines, and treating art simply as material
culture. It then explores the recent concepts of art as affective material culture, as socially
defined networks, and as locally defined aesthetic action. Finally, it raises the possibility
that art is our local category of the kind of powerful objects found in many cultures.

Introduction to understand something like European Neolithic fig-

‘Art’ is universal and straightforward to define—or is
it? In the popular understanding of the term, skilled
and sensitive artists produce things such as paint-
ings and sculptures which communicate their insights
to viewers. An oil painting on a gallery wall thus
clearly qualifies as ‘art’. But what of a skilfully cre-
ated, meaning-laden magazine photograph, a cereal
box, or even a well-decorated cake? Defining art be-
comes even more problematic when we deal with an-
cient objects. We are happy to consider pictures and
modelled objects from ancient or ethnographic con-
texts as ‘art’ when they look similar enough to our
own objets d’art—the Lascaux Cave painted horses, for
example, or Pueblo pottery. But often they do not. To
take one obvious point, a lot of ethnographic and pre-
historic ‘art’ is unornamented, frightening, hideous,
or at least patently unconcerned with aesthetic ap-
peal or beauty as we know it. Likewise, a lot of an-
cient ‘art’ was meant to be used practically rather than
viewed in the reverential, sometimes moonstruck way
our museum objects are. It is probably more accurate
urines as akin to a medical technology than to Michel-
angelo’s David.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have long
been aware of the mismatch between a modern West-
ern definition of art and how to understand objects
from other cultures. The traditional critique revolved
around the idea that ‘art’ is concerned with aesthetic
value and beauty, but these vary between cultures; if
beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how can we judge
art cross-culturally? Moreover, ‘art’ implies a particu-
lar social configuration, with artists, patrons and con-
sumers interacting in contexts of aesthetic consump-
tion and connoisseurship; none of this applies to most
figured objects in our own culture (advertising im-
agery, for instance), much less to contexts of mak-
ing and use in other cultures. Thus, art historians
have struggled to integrate non-Western art into their
their canon and criticism (Elkins 2002). On their side,
for most of the twentieth century, with few excep-
tions (Forge 1973), anthropologists ignored the con-
cept of art. Instead, they preferred to talk about ‘craft’,
which avoided assumptions of authorship and value,

Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27:4, 587–597 

C 2017 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

doi:10.1017/S0959774317000725

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 John Robb
or they analysed art simply as expressive material cul-
ture to elicit culture-specific cognitive patterns (Lay-
ton 1991). This distrust of the concept of art persists
(Morphy & Perkins 2006). Indeed, most anthropolog-
ical discussion of art in recent decades concerns pre-
cisely this mismatch, in exploring how things such as
Melanesian carvings or Australian aboriginal paint-
ings cross cultural boundaries to become commod-
ified as art (Küchler 2002; Myers 2002). Archaeolo-
gists have been similarly ambivalent about the con-
cept. The term is commonly used in archaeology as a
rubric for cave paintings, petroglyphs, figurines and
similar objects. When we use the term in this way, it
is usually acknowledged explicitly or implicitly that
most of what we call ‘art’ archaeologically should not
be understood as art in a modern sense. The term still
carries an aura of value, however, gilding these ob-
jects with a sense of specialness, and archaeologists
sometimes play the ‘art’ card for all it is worth, claim-
ing that Palaeolithic people painting caves were Ice
Age Picassos in order to lure grant funding or public
interest.
Since 1990, the situation has evolved signifi-
cantly. Anthropologists have claimed that some con-
cept of art is applicable, and indeed necessary, to un-
derstand objects made by people in other cultures
(Morphy & Perkins 2006). The theoretical resurgence
has been spearheaded by Gell’s work on art as mate-
rial culture (Gell 1998) and several authors’ work on
cross-cultural concepts of aesthetics (Coote & Shelton
1992; Heyd 2012; Morphy 1992). Meanwhile, a sub-
stantial body of material culture theory has emerged
which may help us to understand complex, figured
or highly valued objects. Can material culture theory
help us to understand art? Or does this theory ob-
viate the need for a concept of art? A third develop-
ment is visual culture studies (Belting 2011; Berger
1972; Mitchell 2006) which argues that the act of see-
ing is culturally and historically specific, not univer-
sal; people and images interact in ways unique to a
historical context and which reproduce specific so-
cial orders. These theories clearly have much poten-
tial relevance to the question of art in other cultures.
Finally, archaeologists have not been idle. While some
archaeologists have been exploring a range of anthro-
pological models (see papers in this section; Cochrane
& Jones 2012; Garrow & Gosden 2012), others have
been developing understandings of art growing out of
specific historical traditions, particularly Australian
aboriginal art and South African hunter-gatherer
art.
To summarize the situation, we have a tradi-
tional, common-sense, definition of art, which exerts
an inescapable, distorting black-hole-like effect upon
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our imagination. The term is widely critiqued, but
it is also widely used, partly because the public and
institutions we deal with understand it and are at-
tracted to it and partly because we have no very clear
alternative. Beneath the surface, several theoretical
paradigms bubble away actively, offering stimulating
potential alternatives; but none has been widely pro-
mulgated as a replacement term. Rather like a combi-
nation compost heap and kitchen garden, it is a bewil-
dering but fertile conceptual mess.
The purpose of this introductory overview is to
explore the conceptual geography of the various pos-
sible positions on the issue, and to suggest some ways
forward. It does not attempt to grapple with art the-
ory and art history, as they provide often rich the-
oretical insight into things generally acknowledged
as art—paintings, sculpture, music, dance and so on,
made by specialists within Western culture in the last
few centuries. Rather, I am principally concerned with
things beyond the margins of this world—the extent
to which both the conventional definition of art and
art theorists’ critical views on it can help us make
sense of things made outside Western culture and be-
fore modern times.
As a large part of the confusion derives from
using one term, ‘art’, to refer to three quite distinct
things, different typefaces are used here in an attempt
to maintain clarity:
(a) As a general concept under discussion, ‘art’ will
be written in a normal font;
(b) AS A TERM FOR A MODERN, WESTERN
SET OF CONCEPTS, INSTITUTIONS AND
PRACTICES, ‘ART’ WILL BE WRITTEN
LIKE THIS;
(c) to connote an archaeological category of
material, usually representational objects
such as figurines, paintings, etc., ‘art’ will
be written like this.
Using jarring typefaces in this way is visually annoy-
ing, but it reminds us to keep distinct the quite sepa-
rate usages of what is confusingly a single term.
Defining ‘art’ in anthropology and archaeology:
two conventional non-answers
In what senses is the term ‘art’ used in archaeology
and anthropology? We can begin by briefly discussing
two commonly encountered non-answers which con-
fuse rather than help our understanding.
‘ART’ in the traditional Western sense
The first non-answer is simply to invoke our tradi-
tional definition of art uncritically. In common usage,
 ‘Art’ in Archaeology and Anthropology
ART refers to an expressive medium whose goal is
to convey the artist’s values and meanings; it is made
by an artist, displays individual skill and perception,
and is meant for aesthetic consumption (for instance,
by viewing or listening in particular venues such as
museums or public places). ART in this sense forms
a genre of high culture; appreciation requires viewers
to have training and confers distinction upon them.
Even when dealing with deeply prehistoric material
from an alien culture world, the term ART is often
used to imply that these objects somehow give a priv-
ileged window into fundamental human values.
‘ART’ in this sense is a magical term, which val-
orizes an object and makes it special. This is appar-
ent in contemporary culture when something such
as an advertising poster or a handmade basket is re-
classified as ART, transforming both its market value
and how people engage with it. It is also clear in the
amount of boundary maintenance the term attracts
(for instance, in insistence that we define distinctions
between ‘fine art’ and ‘commercial art’ or ‘craft’, or
in arguments over whether a particular borderline
instance ‘is ART’ or is not); clearly this is an acco-
lade to bestow restrictedly, lest its value become di-
luted. Within archaeology, calling something ART in
this sense may be done naively, or sometimes meretri-
ciously; it casts an aura over sometimes crude images
and blobby figurines to bewitch readers, museum-
goers, funding agencies and, quite often, ourselves.
The most conceptually justified usage is when the
term is used with explicit intention to highlight pre-
sumably universal human attributes—most notably,
the cognitive capability for symbolic representation
evident for the first time in Palaeolithic imagery.
As an anthropological term of analysis, ART in
the conventional sense quickly encounters limits and
problems. The usage does not apply well to most im-
agery or figured material culture in our own society,
which nevertheless can be made with great skill, be
laden with meanings and have socially compelling
roles and effects. It thus excludes much material of in-
terest, and the distinction between art and non-art be-
comes difficult to maintain with any rigour. The usage
fares even worse when applied to objects from non-
Western and non-modern societies. This is tacitly ac-
knowledged in the extensive work that must be per-
formed to transform an object from such a context—a
tribal carving, for instance, or an altarpiece removed
from a medieval church—into ART. This collective
project of making something which originally is not
art into ART is carried out by an ensemble of critics,
patrons, connoisseurs, academics and the art market,
and occurs with predictably regularity with indige-
nous and pre-modern ART around the world. It in-
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volves identifying or creating individual authors for
objects (sometimes imposing an inappropriate con-
cept of individual authorship itself), developing con-
texts of valuation and consumption and discourses of
connoisseurship, and finding or inventing explicit ex-
egeses of the object’s ‘meaning’.
Underlying the conventional definition of ART
is a representational paradigm of meaning: the mean-
ing of an artwork is the message, value or insight
the author intends to convey. This follows the Saus-
surean model of the sign (which in turn formalizes a
common-sense matter–mind dichotomy): the art ob-
ject is a material signifier and the meaning is what
it signifies conceptually. Where we know the sub-
ject of the work (as in an Impressionist painting of a
haystack), the meaning is accessed through commen-
tary on the skill and style of expression; where we
do not, the starting point is some indication of what
the object represents. In the most reductionistic sense,
the meaning becomes the label next to the painting or
sculpture, something museum visitors turn to imme-
diately and instinctively before reacting to a work. The
biggest problem with this is simply that many objects
we apply this definition to were not intended to be un-
derstood in this way. To take an example, a ‘world art’
museum may juxtapose Cubist paintings or Expres-
sionist sculptures with ritual masks from Melanesia
and prehistoric figurines from Greece, implicitly as-
serting that they are the same kind of thing to be inter-
preted in the same way. Yet while we may not know
what a prehistoric figurine was used for, we can be
fairly sure it was not intended to be passed around
amidst a critical discussion of the author’s vision of
the human condition; the ritual mask, like most fig-
ured objects in the world, was principally intended
to do something rather than mean something, and la-
belling it an ‘ancestral figure’ or a ‘spirit’ does not re-
ally help us to understand how it worked socially or
why it held compelling affective power. Trying to as-
similate such objects into our category of ART sim-
ply forces us into interpretive contortions, and treat-
ing material things merely as representations loses a
lot of what made these powerful objects powerful.
‘art plus disclaimer’
Among archaeologists, the most common use of the
term ‘art’ is what we might call ‘art plus disclaimer’.
This consists of acknowledging explicitly or implic-
itly that our modern usage of ART does not fit objects
from ancient contexts, but then using the term any-
way, in the sense of art, to refer to representational
objects such as figurines, statues, cave paintings, rock
art and so on. We justify this on the grounds that (a)
such things are representational objects, which makes
 John Robb
them generically akin to modern artworks if we as-
sume that all representations share in some universal
characteristics of imagery such as meaning; and (b)
we need some rubric for archaeological discussions of
these things and no useful alternative is available. The
result is a specifically archaeological usage: ‘art? yes,
I know they were not really ART, but I have to call
them something.’
The ‘art plus disclaimer’ strategy is a traditional
tactic, encoded in phrases such as ‘prehistoric art’ and
‘rock art’. Like it or not, it may be forced upon us dis-
ciplinarily by publication editors, reviewers and read-
ers, museum curators and the institutions they medi-
ate, and funding bodies, and by the need to commu-
nicate with a public which thinks in such terms. The
real problem with this approach is that the term art
carries a heavy load of conceptual baggage derived
from ART. Epistemologically, theoretical categoriza-
tions are interdependent with the practices used to
create data, and use of a term inevitably structures
how we think. Although many archaeologists are crit-
ically aware of the term’s baggage, it is hard, perhaps
impossible, to use the term without invoking the un-
spoken concept and its valorization. This is clear in
the resistance one meets if one suggests recategoriz-
ing rock art as ‘technology’, figurines as ‘toys’, or me-
galithic art as ‘interior décor’. Evidently, we still think
that the term ‘art’ adds something special to the ob-
jects. Moreover, the art-historical concept of ART con-
tinues to structure archaeological analysis of art in
subtle, disciplinarily normalized ways. Most funda-
mentally, once we designate something as ‘art’, we
are predisposed to think that the goal of interpreta-
tion is to elicit its discursive meaning. Indeed, many
discussions of archaeological art simply assume un-
questioningly that this is so. This in turn channels
the subsequent process of data creation and analy-
sis down different routes than we would follow if
we categorized the same objects by any other term
(such as ‘technology’, ‘toys’, ‘decoration’, ‘furnish-
ings’ or something else). The effect works through dis-
ciplinary practices such as how data are created and
published. For example, for almost any body of ar-
chaeological art, there is a strong publication bias
in favour of overtly representational imagery as op-
posed to ‘abstract’ or ‘decorative’ images. Something
that looks like a narrative picture to us has a much
greater chance of winding up in print than enigmatic
geometric glyphs. Similarly, if the goal of analysis is to
decode a representation and interpret its iconographic
meaning, the first question is ‘what is it a picture of?’
and a simplified black-and-white line drawing is of-
ten the best way to answer this. But such images fil-
ter out most other information, which might be rel-
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evant to answering other questions. They lose any
sense of the material the object is made of, its architec-
tural or landscape setting, the signs of production, us-
age, and biography, and often even its scale. By effec-
tively de-materializing art and reducing it to a cogni-
tive representation, disciplinary practices prevent us
from understanding how it was made and how peo-
ple actually interacted with it. To the extent that black-
and-white line drawings are the industry standard for
publishing things such as catalogues of archaeologi-
cal art, they recursively channel us unthinkingly back
into investigating representation and meaning, while
actually precluding us from answering other ques-
tions.
A partial answer: ‘It’s not “art”, it’s just material
culture’
Alternatively, we could bypass the issue entirely,
avoiding the term and concept of art and simply treat-
ing the objects as material culture like any other mate-
rial culture. This approach is not commonly employed
for figurines and visual imagery, except in specifically
technological analyses of their material and châine
opératoire; it is more common for things such as dec-
orated pottery and metalwork. A theoretical patron
saint could perhaps be found in Gell (1992; 1998),
whose explicitly ‘philistine’ approach to art attempts
to circumvent discourses of meaning and authorship;
indeed, Gell treats art simply as a specialized form of
material culture. As Gell intended, this may be a use-
ful theoretical shock therapy, as much art theory still
reflects the underlying shape of the historic Western
concept of ART even while critiquing it.
But treating art as material culture seems neces-
sary, but not sufficient. Art objects are material cul-
ture, and we can and should analyse them as such,
not only technologically, but in terms of their social
functionality (see below). Moreover, even in a soci-
ety with active institutions dedicated to policing art
as a social and commercial phenomenon, it is both
impossible and unnecessary to establish a clear bor-
der between art and material culture in general; this
can only be even more so in societies without a his-
torically inherited concept of ART. But dissolving the
category of art into material culture loses one impor-
tant insight. Material culture performs many differ-
ent functions. If a form of material culture performs
a specific social function, its characteristics will re-
flect the requirements of that function. Whether or not
we choose to use the term ‘art’, it is clearly useful to
be able to highlight kinds of objects used in partic-
ular contexts or roles, rather than losing them all in
an undifferentiated heap of material culture. Hence
 ‘Art’ in Archaeology and Anthropology
we can certainly analyse art objects as material cul-
ture, but hopefully that theorization will include some
further specification of what their particular social
functionality is and how it relates to their observable
characteristics.
Defining art: three current theoretical perspectives
These non-answers and partial answers encapsulate
much archaeological use of the term ‘art’, but there
is a much richer theoretical literature on the topic in
archaeology, anthropology and other fields. Writings
on the topic do not fall into a neat typology either dis-
ciplinarily or conceptually, but they can be grouped
loosely around three quite distinct questions:
1. What is the particular social functionality of an ob-
ject, and how does it accomplish it?
2. What social projects and networks call these objects
into being?
3. How do art objects form part of a broader system
of visual culture or aesthetic action?
How does an art object work? Affective material culture
and social functionality
In Art and Agency (1998), Alfred Gell proposed a
straightforward, powerful way of understanding art
as a social technology. In brief, Gell argued that soci-
ety runs on emotions such as solidarity, trust, comfort,
fear, anger, recognition, curiosity and disorientation,
which bind people together into networks of com-
mon sentiment and action. But emotions, responses
and actions are anything but spontaneous, individ-
ual psychological effusions; they are routinized and
engineered, often by cues and prompts built into our
material settings. In Gell’s definition, ‘art’ is a spe-
cialized form of material culture or technology whose
particular purpose is to provoke a socially desired
response. Art acts upon people. Thus, in one clas-
sic Gellian example, a decorated object is often dec-
orated, not simply to make it attractive, nor to ex-
press representationally the values or meanings in-
tended by the artist (neither view would account for
inexplicable commonness of polka dots and stripes in
the world!). Instead, the decoration helps the object
to accomplish its psychological functionality, for in-
stance reassuring users, or making a context or object
feel familiar. Other objects, such as the prowboards
of Trobriand kula trading canoes, may be intended
to threaten or frighten the viewer. In another Gellian
example, a ‘technology of enchantment’ is an object
whose design, material, or technological sophistica-
tion is intended to provoke feelings of awe or daz-
zlement in the viewer. Art in Gell’s sense also en-
compasses things which accomplish material speech
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acts: designating, categorizing, transforming and so
on. Thus, there is a great variety of modelled, figured,
designed, coloured and textured objects in our own
society, from sculptures and paintings to brand logos,
religious icons, shop mannequins, commercial pack-
aging, light switches, etc.; this reflects the great vari-
ety of social tasks to be done. These objects help trig-
ger emotions, presence beings, create appropriate set-
tings for particular social actions, reassure people, up-
set them and so on.
This perspective helps us to pose several impor-
tant questions about an object:
• What social project does an object form part of?
• What effect is the object supposed to have on the
user?
• And, critically, how do its material and design fea-
tures allow it to do it?
For affective material culture, some of these fea-
tures are relatively obvious: size and visibility, audi-
bility, haptic and other sensory qualities, costliness
and use of restricted materials, ostentatious skill or
technical achievement. They may have subtler psy-
chological effects as well (for instance, scaling up or
down to manipulate a sense of time: Bailey 2005).
Other features will relate to semantic or rhetorical
needs, expressed through motifs, colours, textures,
designs or style (a neutral white background is reas-
suring in a medical setting; a shop mannequin has a
blurred or generic face to allow viewers to interpo-
late their own identity or narrative). Moreover, spe-
cific forms of design may impose specific cognitive re-
quirements upon users (for instance, ‘perfect’ objects
such as polished stone axes can be assessed as flawless
or especially valuable by casual observers at a glance,
while ‘involved’ objects such as ornate pottery require
the viewer to refer to layered semantic contexts: Robb
2015b). As this implies, expressive material culture of-
ten incorporates internal cues and standards which
guide the viewer/user in how to interpret it; these
form a visual language or visual culture whose cumu-
lative effect may be to inculcate interpretive reflexes in
the subjects making and using it; pictures also teach
us how to see. In a form of reverse-engineering, by
analysing patterning in art objects, we may be able
to understand these social purposes and reflexes. This
perspective has recently been used to interpret ‘Celtic’
art designs (Garrow & Gosden 2012) as well as macro-
trends in prehistoric art genres (Robb 2015a). In the
papers below, Creese and DeMarrais put a strong Gel-
lian emphasis on investigating how things such as Iro-
quoian pipes and Andean geometrically designs act
efficaciously.
In the first instance, this perspective gives us
a powerful approach for analysing specific objects,
 John Robb
typically finished objects in use. It helps us investigate
what art does rather than what it means, and how art
is efficacious. Used narrowly in this way, it takes for
granted the broader social system in which the social
tasks arise and the systems of aesthetic reflexes which
art objects harness to do these tasks.1 We turn to these
next.
Art, sociologically: institutions and conventions, or the
frame is what makes it art
The pop artist Andy Warhol once made perfect repli-
cas of cardboard boxes of Brillo soap pads for an art
exhibition; then, when asked to stage a subsequent ex-
hibition at short notice, he simply bought some gen-
uine boxes from the Brillo company and put them on
display. Warhol’s point, of course, was to poke fun
ironically at the art world, which lionized the artist-
as-creative-genius. The Brillo boxes argue that it is
not the object itself, or any remarkable perception or
skill bestowed upon it by the artist, which constitutes
ART; it is the act of being put on display in a gallery.
Effectively, if we put a picture on a cereal box, it is not
art, but advertising, with the mundane practical goal
of helping sell the cereal; if we frame the same pic-
ture, put it on a wall, attribute it to an author and criti-
cally discuss its meaning or aesthetic value, it becomes
ART. In a sociological perspective, art objects are thus
any objects which are treated as art within the institu-
tions of the ‘art world’, a heterogeneous network of
artists, patrons, critics, audiences, technicians, suppli-
ers of materials and others (Becker 1984).
Warhol’s ironic approach mirrors that often
adopted by sociologists and anthropologists of art,
in which ART is taken to be a conventionally de-
fined genre of modern Western high culture, and the
goal of analysis is to understand how it behaves as
such. Such an approach has clear affinities on one
hand with Bourdieu’s work on ART as cultural capi-
tal (Bourdieu 1984) and on the other with Actor Net-
work Theory (Latour 2005). The latter, for instance,
would see ART as the product, not of individual
creators, but of a heterogeneous network of human
and non-human actants, including people of various
kinds (artists, producers, audiences), places (studios,
galleries) and materials and technologies (canvases,
frames, paint, media for diffusing imagery). This is es-
sentially a constructivist approach to art; the assump-
tion is that any kind of object or performance will
work equally well as ART, provided it is institution-
ally construed as such, or, perhaps, conforms to some
straightforward criteria such as scarcity, expense, or
affording scope for distinction. Bailey’s paper below,
in fact, builds upon this constructivism, arguing that
archaeologists should feel free to liberate archaeologi-
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cal material from its context in the past and repurpose
it as a resource in the present.
This perspective poses important analytical
questions:
• What networks generate the social need for art?
Why is the project calling art into existence defined
as it is?
• Who is involved with creating art objects? How do
their relations influence its form and products?
• How are materials and resources mobilized? How
do these intervene in the production process?
To take an example, at a modern art pottery
show, the ceramics on display are extremely varied;
no two potters make the same kind of wares. This
stylistic heterogeneity cannot be explained by taught
traditions or different aesthetic backgrounds, nor by
the social functionality of the objects (as in the preced-
ing approach); they all have more or less the same job,
to be objets d’art. Instead, underlying economic and so-
cial nature of the ‘art production system’ generates the
diversity. Both to maintain their distance from ‘craft’
and to define themselves as artists in relation to the
market, potters are taught to ‘find their own voice’
and develop a visually distinctive style.
What can be generalized from the sociological
approach to help us understand cultures without
ART? One key point is simply that different cultures
engage with material culture differently (for instance,
Küchler 2002). Beyond this, it shows how art, whether
ours or other people’s, is produced within specific
social networks and contexts; one important goal of
the archaeology and anthropology of art is to trace
its characteristics to features of these networks and
contexts, as in the art pottery example above. Sim-
ilarly, Nowell’s paper below maps out some direc-
tions in which Palaeolithic art has to be understood in
terms of the system of relationships and communities
generating it. However, we can go beyond this rela-
tively straightforward inference. This approach sug-
gests that an understanding of art as a mode of ma-
terial culture is one of the defining characteristics of
these shared contexts of production and use; you can-
not have an ‘art world’ without a shared understand-
ing of what ART is. Generalizing from this, other
societies may have their own specific forms of pro-
duction which are regarded as inherently valuable,
powerful or essential to constituting particular con-
texts or realms of value; the most common form is
probably sacred or cosmologically powerful objects:
Miller’s paper below highlights this powerfully for
the ancient Maya. In the papers below, Zedeño, Creese
and DeMarrais all underline in their own way that in-
digenous productions were situated in local ontolo-
gies, not in universal categories. If this is so, we should
 ‘Art’ in Archaeology and Anthropology
perhaps not assimilate other peoples’ powerful ob-
jects to our concept of ART; instead, our concept of
ART may be best seen as a local form of a more gen-
eral category of locally defined powerful objects.
How can art work? Art as aesthetic action and visual
culture
One of the hardest things to ‘get’ is the art and mu-
sic of another culture. Remember moving through a
gallery of African, American or Melanesian indige-
nous art, or listening to Indian or East Asian music.
Unless you have spent much time in these cultures
or have acquired expert knowledge, you can see and
hear things, but the rhythms of the music, the bal-
ance and themes of the pictures make little intuitive
sense to you. Our usual response is translation and
commentary—a label next to the carving saying ‘rep-
resentation of ancestral spirit’, a bit of text saying ‘the
counterpoint recalls the sound of flowing water’. But
these tend simply to underline the gulf in understand-
ing; they do not tell us why one figure is frightful and
another joyful, why one melody is comfortingly tra-
ditional, another daringly innovative, why the work
has power to affect someone emotionally, rather than
just communicate a message intellectually. This lack of
comprehensibility is a signal that we are in the pres-
ence of alterity, of a visual or oral culture different
from our own.
As this suggests, any individual art object or net-
work rests upon systems of more general reflexes and
dispositions which transcend it and which it repro-
duces and comments upon. For much of the history
of anthropology, art was regarded within a semiotic
or representational paradigm; anthropologists from
Boas to Lévi-Strauss mined art as a source of mean-
ing, the mental organization, the cognitive codes of
their informants (Layton 1991). But treating the in-
terpretation of art simply as a matter of decoding
cognitive representations misses the essence of the
act of interpretation. Efforts to deepen the discussion
have been developed in two distinct directions. One
is a recent revival of aesthetics within anthropology
(Coote & Shelton 1992; Heyd 2012). Aesthetics in this
sense is defined as a culturally specific sense of qual-
ities which can be actualized through colour, pattern,
sound and gesture. For example, Australian Aborig-
inal concepts of ancestral power can be actualized or
presenced through visually dazzling patterns or the
brilliant play of light (Morphy 1992); East African an-
cestral shrines, dance and language all incorporate
reference to patterns originating in the curve of cat-
tle horns (Coote 1992). Such aesthetic qualities give a
sense of rightness to what Coote terms ‘marvels of ev-
eryday vision’ (Coote, 1992). In this collection, Skeates
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provides a theoretical charter for an archaeology of
aesthetic action and Wells provides a well-crafted, un-
usually clear example, that of Iron Age European vi-
sual response. Fundamentally, such theories discuss
the elemental qualities of material meaning—why a
movement or gesture or sound has potential to signify
something to an appropriate audience. This significa-
tion is not really at a representational or interpretive
level; it happens at a more abstract, prior level, a level
where it is not really appropriate to translate it into
discursive ‘meaning’ because it is really constituting
the potentials to make up such meanings. Aesthetic
approaches do not apply only to art; in them, the bor-
der between art and all other processes of making and
acting becomes labile or arguable. The key is acting
in accordance with some governing set of values. Ex-
tending this line of argument, if we feel it necessary
to distinguish ‘art’ from aesthetic action more gener-
ally, it may consist of action which self-consciously
attempts to foreground and exemplify such qualities
and the skill necessary to create them, in the process
rendering the aesthetic reflexes explicit.
The other line of thought develops out of the
art-historical realization that the act of looking at pic-
tures is not a neutral, transparent or universal act; in-
stead, it is culturally specific, learned and semanti-
cally embedded in concepts of social relationality and
power. A representational paradigm implies that im-
ages simply supply cognitive content on demand and
that interpretation is a straightforward matter of de-
coding the content. In contrast, visual culture theory
problematizes relations between people and images.
In an older generation of art theory, Berger’s influ-
ential book Ways of Seeing (1972) reconstrued West-
ern art in terms of male consumption of female sex-
uality, a line of thought continued in feminist art his-
tory (Koloski-Ostrow & Lyons, 1997). Other works
have tried to identify period-specific ways of see-
ing (Baxandall 1972) and linked the development of
landscape painting, still-lifes and vision conceptually
with the development of capitalism (Alpers 1984).
More recent theorists reframe the question of how im-
ages affect viewers (Belting 2011; Mitchell 2006). Other
visual-culture theorists highlight the politicization of
the act of seeing, of vision as a mode of reproducing
domination, whether racial, gendered, heterosexual,
or colonial. In this collection, Fowles’ paper follows
this line of thought in examining how pictures affect
viewers, though he goes beyond the limits of conven-
tional art theory in advocating a specifically archaeo-
logically ‘big picture’ history of vision.
These approaches to art, material culture and im-
agery do not see objects in isolation, but as part of
a larger sense of order or system of reflexes which
 John Robb
emerges from multiple things and forms of action. Be-
cause they focus upon general principles of order, the
object of study is really the processes of making and
seeing rather than the product itself, an object. It is the
correct or skilful way of doing things; it is always per-
formative. Thus, the concept of art could be applied
to almost any object or action, unbounding the cate-
gory; art as aesthetic action is not a thing, but a way of
doing. Thus, methodologically, as Skeates’ and Wells’
papers show, in contrast to the focus upon specific ob-
jects, contexts or social networks which form the fo-
cus of other approaches, an archaeology of art as aes-
thetic action involves evoking general patterns, qual-
ities and reflexes which cross-cut objects and fields of
action.
Discussion: where to go from here?
To conclude this overview, it is useful to step back and
ask where the field stands and where we can go from
here.
The real problems with the A-word
Should we use the term ‘art’ to refer to non-Western
productions or non-modern productions? This is con-
troversial. Some archaeologists and anthropologists
feel that the term adds something useful, either in
a traditional usage or following one of the theo-
retical approaches above. Some prefer to avoid the
term because it has too much theoretical baggage.
Many feel that it is problematic, but that we are stuck
with it by disciplinary or institutional constraints. But
whichever of these is the case, we do need to recog-
nize the theoretical costs or risks of using it.
One manifestation of the term’s theoretical bag-
gage is the way it prompts us inevitably to ask two
questions which tell us more about ourselves and our
expectations than about the object. The first is ‘Is it
art?’ In the three theoretical perspectives reviewed
above, if we see art either as a social technology or
as aesthetic action, in both views the category is un-
bounded; it is at best a subset of material culture dis-
tinguished by a particular focus rather than a sharply
bounded category. If, on the other hand, we look at
art sociologically as ART, the product of the networks
constituting an ‘art world’, it is clear that the desire
to draw a sharp boundary to ‘art’ is boundary main-
tenance of a prestigious or fetishized social category.
The question is an integral part of the phenomenon
we are trying to explain, rather than a useful part of
any explanation. The other question is ‘What does it
mean?’ The question itself grows out of our own rep-
resentational paradigm for imagery, along with the
concept of ART as an expressive or communicative
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medium. While it is clearly useful to know the gen-
eral subject a representational object refers to, reduc-
ing interpretation to answering this question gener-
ally misses the point, leading us to overlook under-
lying questions of why affective objects are powerful,
and why people interact with them as they do (for in-
stance, why they understand a statue, not as a repre-
sentation of a deity, but as the deity itself). As Gell’s
work directs us, we should think less about what art
means and more about what art does and how it does
it.
Underlying these issues, I would suggest that
there are two deeper, possibly terminal problems with
the term ‘art’.
1. First, it implies that art has an essence, that we are
talking about a single thing. This may be tied up
with a disciplinary search silently inherited from
art history for a single essence which character-
izes ‘true’ art as a bounded, specifiable category.
The three perspectives reviewed above pose dis-
tinct questions about quite different subsets of ma-
terial culture or aspects of experiential process. In-
sisting that all of these must align and that our
proper object of study lives only in the place where
they overlap is unnecessary and distorts our subse-
quent thinking.
2. Secondly, the term ‘art’ is perhaps irretrievably em-
bedded in disciplinary practices. It pre-chooses the
kind of objects discussed (representational objects,
things with obvious high investment of materi-
als and skill and things without obvious useful
functions aside from aesthetic enjoyment—in other
words, things which correspond prima facie to our
ART objects). This is then implemented through
analytical choices such as separating such objects
from their materiality and contexts and asking dif-
ferent questions about them than about other ma-
terial culture. And it implies what the art specialist
is supposed to do—in particular, close reading and
exegesis of the interpretation of ‘meaning’. Such
expectations are enforced disciplinarily. As in the
example of prehistoric art above, it structures dis-
ciplinary pathways for how we create data which
prompt us to ask some questions and which ac-
tively prevent us from answering others.
The map of art
The review above makes clear that, broadly speaking,
there are at least three distinct anthropologies and ar-
chaeologies of art, each with a different definition of
the term, sense of the problem to be understood and
methodological strategies.
• Art as aesthetic action and visual culture. This cen-
tres around the question of how art can mean
 ‘Art’ in Archaeology and Anthropology
something, either by looking at elemental aesthetic
signification or by looking at vision as a socially
constructed act laden with power and meaning.
This approach focuses upon how art is meaningful,
but often at such an abstract level that if we elicit
the underlying structures as some kind of explicit
‘meaning’, the result sounds forced, stilted and im-
probable; deeply embedded, society-wide ontolog-
ical, class and gender norms may inform the design
of a cereal box, but it is not really accurate to high-
light them as the ‘meaning’ of it. Art as aesthetic
action is typically unbounded or poorly bounded,
shading into all sorts of everyday action, gesture
and material culture. Analysis might typically em-
ploy analysis of patterns and qualities to under-
stand aesthetically significant aspects of action and
to deduce the interpretive frameworks constructing
vision.
• Art as a production system, the product of a spe-
cific set of social institutions and networks (the ‘art
world’ in the modern West, but potentially analo-
gous institutions and networks producing power-
fully categorized objects in other societies). ‘Art’ in
this sense refers to a category of object defined lo-
cally and often quite sharply within such networks.
Analysis might centre on identifying how powerful
objects are the products, not of single creators, but
of heterogeneous networks of people and materi-
als, and on identifying what social role they are in-
tended to accomplish—for instance, how fine met-
alwork formed part of networks of material provi-
sion, craft production, gift exchange and display in
Bronze and Iron Age Europe.
• Art as affective material culture, a specific kind of ob-
ject designed to accomplish social tasks. The key
question here is how art acts, what it does. ‘Art’ in
this sense is again a very poorly bounded category,
as probably all material culture involves some built-
in element of psychological functionality. Analysis
would typically centre around close analysis of a
specific kind of object, to show how it harnesses
broader aesthetic reflexes within particular social
contexts and need to create objects whose material
attributes and design features allow it to act effica-
ciously.
These clearly presuppose each other, and it is of-
ten impossible to pigeonhole a specific analysis into
one or another category; many of the papers below
really work back and forth between several of these.
Art as powerful objects: an emerging archaeology of art
The papers in this collection give a sense of the var-
ied, creative ways archaeologists can think about art.
Indeed, once we get beyond the confusion caused
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by assuming that discussions of art must all be dis-
cussing the same thing, having different perspectives
analysing art can be a strength. But are important
new perspectives emerging? Here, a number of pa-
pers converge to suggest a coalescing centre of gravity,
that of powerful objects.
It will be apparent that the three analytical per-
spectives outlined above often do not overlap, and
we can employ each one without assuming that it ad-
dresses the same problems and material as the oth-
ers. Yet, when they do overlap, they create special cat-
egories of object. The argument is that many, if not
all, societies make special categories of object which
are understood as cosmologically or ontologically dif-
ferent from everyday material culture. Such powerful
objects
• Do serious work of cosmological action or creating
social value;
• Consciously foreground aesthetic qualities and
may involve particular, ontologically highlighted
ways of seeing; this may be effected through a range
of ways, including use of particularly valued mate-
rials, ostentatious investment of skill, decoration or
thematic referencing, ritual practice, or visual para-
dox or transformation;
• Are the product of tangible, delimited social net-
works in particular contexts, often involving high-
status people or offices, high-stakes political mes-
sages, or highly valued things and experiences;
• Require people to interact with them in ways dif-
ferent from ‘ordinary’ objects; they may impose
moral obligations, or have particularly powerful,
even transformative effects upon viewers or users.
Such compelling objects are well described by
Miller (this section). They harness aesthetic reflexes
to particular tasks (Wells, Skeates, this section). They
may effectively materialize politicized messages (De-
Marrais et al. 1996). They may also materialize dif-
ferent ontologies (for instance, ritual or animated ob-
jects which do not represent cosmic forces, but which
are cosmic forces). The most obvious examples are
sacred or animate objects. In Medieval Europe, for
instance, crucifixes, reliquaries, icons and other re-
ligious objects were understood to contain spiritual
power which demanded reverence and could receive
prayer and entreaty. The richness of their construc-
tion was sometimes understood as a fitting manifes-
tation of this spiritual value. In the Andes, huacas in-
cluded things such as stones which were understood
as animate beings and treated as such (Bray 2009) (De-
Marrais, this section). In Iroquoian society, wampum-
shell beads were understood not merely as an eco-
nomic commodity, but also as affectively compelling
(J. Creese pers. comm., 2016), and representational
 John Robb
objects could also be animate (Creese, this section).
Zedeño outlines beautifully how Blackfoot tipis were
not simply expressive, but involved dreams and spir-
its. In these and other examples, it is not surprising
to find high-value materials deployed often in elite
contexts for political purposes; the surprising and im-
portant thing is how these objects are neither simple
representations nor decontextualized ‘valuables’, but
consistently have an underlying ontological enmesh-
ment and prescribe particular forms of response.
The logical conclusion is thus not that all societies
have some version of ‘art’; it is distorting to assimi-
late other people’s powerful objects to our ‘art’. But
neither is it that our ‘art’ has no relationship to any
indigenous categories of things in other societies (this
would seem an extreme form of Western exceptional-
ism). Instead, it is probably more correct to see ART
as our local version of the kind of powerful objects
many cultures have. To the extent it differs from other
cultures’ categories of powerful objects, its distinctive
form has been shaped by both a deep-historical repre-
sentationalist framework which separates the ‘mind’
or meaning from the ‘matter’ or image, and the cap-
italist system within which ART is produced and
serves to create social distinctions.
If this is so, it follows that our proper task is to
develop, not an anthropology and archaeology of art
per se, but rather of locally defined powerful objects,
in a way which investigates rather than presumes the
bases of their power. This would likely include things
we often do not consider as art (such as found ob-
jects, landscape features or ‘tools’ such as polished
stone axes); conversely, it might exclude much mate-
rial we often consider art, or at least art, such as many
rock carvings or figurines which had other purposes
and understandings. Methodologically, it is not diffi-
cult to imagine archaeological bridges to object power,
based upon historic and ethnographic examples. Dia-
critic signs of a different order of material thing might
include styles and qualities, such as the shine of gold
and the dazzling patterns signifying ancestral power;
materials, such as ochre, which in some Native Amer-
ican groups served to animate things it was applied to
(Zedeño 2009); practices, such as treating a stone like
an animated being; and contexts and framing devices,
such as a sanctified setting, or indeed a plinth in a mu-
seum gallery.
Note
1
Gell himself developed it in several directions which
parallel the complementary perspectives discussed be-
low (Gell 1998). For example, his discussion of art as
‘distributed objects’ and the art corpus as a genera-
596
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tive system intersects discussions of art production sys-
tems, and his discussion of the replication of pattern in
Marquesan carvings mirrors perspectives on aesthetic
reflexes below.
John Robb
Department of Archaeology
University of Cambridge
Downing Street
Cambridge CB2 3DZ
UK
Email: jer39@cam.ac.uk
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Author biography
John Robb is Professor of European Prehistory at
the University of Cambridge. He studies Mediter-
ranean prehistory, prehistoric art, and human skeletal
remains.