How ancient Europeans saw the world : vision, patterns, and the shaping of the mind in prehistoric times / Peter S. Wells.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wells, Peter S.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prehistoric peoples--Europe, Western.

Prehistoric peoples.

Material culture--Europe, Western.

Material culture.

Antiquities, Prehistoric--Europe, Western.

Antiquities, Prehistoric.

Symbolism.

Bronze age--Europe, Western.

Bronze age.

Iron age--Europe, Western.

Iron age.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (304 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places--and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience. How Ancient Europeans Saw the World offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Part I: Theory and Method

Part II: Material: Objects and Arrangements

Part III: Interpreting the Patterns

Conclusion

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

REFERENCES CITED

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613852403

9781283539951

1283539950

9781400844777

1400844770

OCLC:

802056567