How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns & the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times

by Peter S. Wells

Europeans during the two millennia before Roman conquest had established urban centers, mass production of goods like pottery & iron tools, a money economy, elaborate rituals & ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was very different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization & today's industrialized societies. Drawing on research in neuroscience & cognitive psychology, he reconstructs how pre-Roman Europeans saw the world & their place in it. He sheds light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings & visual perceptions thru the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery & metal ornaments they decorated & the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places--& how these forms & patterns in turn shaped their experience. "How Ancient Europeans Saw the World" offers a new approach to the study of Bronze & Iron Age Europe, challenging views about prehistoric cultures. It demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures pre-Roman Europeans built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements & burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of how they look to us. Rather, we must view these objects & visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by those fashioning them.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Of monsters & flowers
Seeing & shaping objects
The visual worlds of early Europe
Frame, focus, visualization
Pottery: the visual ecology of the everyday
Attraction & enchantment: fibulae
Status & violence: swords & scabbards
Arranging spaces: objects in graves
Performances: objects & bodies in motion
New media in the late Iron Age: coins & writing
Changing patterns in objects & in perception
Contacts, commerce & the dynamics of new visual patterns
The visuality of objects, past & present
Bibliographic Essay
References Cited
Index

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Archaeology, Prehistory

304 pages, Hardcover

First published August 21, 2012

Reviews

[Alison Lilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don’t be misled by the simple writing style of this book, which can at times come across as repetitive or overly obvious. The ideas Wells presents here represent the application of radically new methodologies in embodied cognitive theory to the field of archeology, revealing new ways of thinking about the meanings and contexts of material culture. The intellectual import of this approach might be easier to appreciate for readers who are already familiar with some of the theories he references in Chapter 2, while the main bulk of the book is dedicated to an extensive investigation of the supporting evidence for his claims. Naturally, this can feel a bit tedious to anyone who doesn’t already find the minutiae of pottery shapes fascinating, but it’s a necessary part of building his argument.

My main complaint is that Wells’ writing style is admittedly very simple — it’s as if he is writing for a lay audience but has missed the mark, aiming for an accessible reading level but failing to include more of the theory (and less of the archeological minutiae) that the average non-expert would find interesting. If you’re mostly interested in theory, focus on Parts I and III and skip Part II. But please read the whole book (and maybe some of the other research he references) before accusing Wells of “over-generalizing”!

[Judyta Szacillo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled to understand why the athor saw it fit to explain it to me that a line is a straight one-dimensional figure - and that was not the only geometry definition to appear there. My feeling throughout the book was that the Author didn't have much to say on the subject, so he filled the book with whatever came handy. The book is full of big claims that were hardly given any substance.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Wells' book surveys two thousand years of European visual culture, from the Bronze Age to the Roman conquests in the Iron. Focused on temperate Europe, he broadly distinguishes three periods: that of 2000 BCE to approximately 500, from 500 to 200, and from 200 until formal conquest—a period ranging from about 50 BCE to the mid-first century depending upon the region under consideration. The final chapter briefly discusses the Roman and medieval periods, suggesting avenues for further research.
The bulk of the text details archaeological evidence. Together with insights drawn from extended mind theory and developmental, perceptual and ecological psychology, these data suggest the outlines of prehistoric worlds quite different in many respects from our own—or the Roman, for that matter. Here Wells waxes almost lyrical, describing homes lit by and centered around firelight, their few furnishings invested with meaning and significance through the generations. At intervals, Wells draws the reader to imagined sympathy for the children brought up in such environments, for the builders of isolated farmsteads or of the later proto-villages, the oppida of up to five thousand inhabitants. Unfortunately, such exercises are only occasional, such flights of imagination limited. The book is weighted towards amassing evidence from such things as grave sites and artifacts.
The spectrum described across these two millennia ranges from individualized craft manufacture to mass production, from kinship to broader community relations, from local to virtually global trade, from gift and barter to business. The most important change, however, may have been the introduction of writing, appearing first on coins. This, allied to the production of commodities, led towards a radically new mindset. Formerly, handcrafted objects—he focuses on such items as fibulae, swords, pots and cups—had conveyed socially significant information not only of their makers, but also about their recipients, serving as a means of visual communication. Now, writing—fixed, detailed, unequivocal--began to fill the void left by the relative decline of individualized craft-production. A primarily connotative mode of communication was becoming supplanted by a denotative throughout many areas even before conquest.
Given the wealth of archaeological analysis, this is not a book for the general reader. The tentative conclusions drawn and the interdisciplinary character of the study should, however, prove fruitful in the hands of other qualified students of prehistoric Europe.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gave up over halfway through. Very repetitive, offering mostly vague-and often limply supported—generalizations. And the lack of illustrations is a real problem; while I’m sympathetic to the cost of licensing, they’re just too central to work like this.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about how Bronze and Iron Age Europeans north of the Alps designed and decorated their ceramic and metal goods, what objects they chose to bury with their dead, and what these things showed about wealth, individuality, technology, and trade: useful and interesting. Jargon about "modes of visualization," extended mind theory, and "performance" (which seems to mean any activity carried out in front of other people): unhelpful and unnecessary.

From the title, I hoped that Wells might answer some of the questions raised, for example, by Richard Bradley in books like The Idea of Order: The Circular Archetype in Prehistoric Europe, about the mental workings of people who for thousands of years lived in rectangular houses but built circular structures for the dead. A reference to Melanesian art, of all things, suggested that he would try to explain minds utterly unlike our own: "In an ethnographic study, Anthony Forge shows how a group in New Guinea has very specific meanings for certain kinds of things that are to be seen and, conversely, how people in that society cannot see some things that we see easily, because of their specific expectations and experiences." Maybe, I thought, this was something along the lines of David Lewis-Williams' bizarre but intriguing speculation in Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods. My bad. But I know more about the archaeology of the period than I did before, which is something.

[Michele · Rating 1 out of 5]

a decent editor would have cut at least 150 pages from this repetitive, meandering mess.

[Sadia Dina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would be better if 'how we think ancient.....' :3

[Maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good survey of pre-historic Europe through a look at its material culture.