ABSTRACT
Images made in the past and images made to represent the past are equally difficult to analyse. They capture the ideas and imaginings of artists in the visual energies of form, line and colour, but their messages are largely hidden. For prehistoric art, the chief villain is time. For archaeological representations of the past, the issues are no less complex. It is common to use pictures in academic research as props for ideas expressed in other forms. Images may be created with an eye to aesthetic quality, but they tend to be ‘representations’ of ideas, or ‘illustrations’ of objects or ‘reconstructions’ of events. They are rarely considered as objects that also communicate directly to viewers, as objects of analysis in their own right. What such pictures actually convey to readers or audiences, the nature of their silent messages, is rarely discussed. The main goal of this book, in chapters about art and perception (Costall), art and illustration (Bradley, James, Trant), photography (Shanks), ancient art (Molyneaux, Sparkes), and recent historic and modern representations of the past (Champion, Fox, Moser and Gamble, Russell, Stoczkowski), is to reveal the cultural life of images, exposing their power and influence as direct statements about social ideas and relations, visual messages that may be as strong and distinctive as those conveyed in texts.
