How Ancient Europeans Saw the World

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