The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture

19. Set in Stone: On Hybrid Images and Social Relationships in Prehistoric and Roman Europe

449 19. Set in Stone: On Hybrid Images and Social Relationships in Prehistoric and Roman Europe Christopher M. Roberts Abstract: This chapter explores how the hybridization of images informs research on cultural contact. Poststructural approaches to meaning and signification suggest that each act of artistic creation and interpretation takes place in reference to the past experiences of the creator and interpreter. The social groups in which people participate place limitations on the total potential experiences a person can have and these can be predicted through the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu. Understanding how an image hybridizes the conventional expectations of more than one group can be used as a means to understand past social and cultural encounters. Such an understanding is reached through an analysis of the way images communicate content to an observer, and this process can be explained using Erwin Panofsky’s concept of iconology. The framework will be demonstrated by comparing hybrid notions of Mediterranean stone sculpture from Iron Age Europe to those of Roman Europe. Images are representations of reality created by molding physical media to reproduce specific sensations in the mind of a viewer. They participate in an ongoing process of interpretation that reoccurs with each act of viewing. By understanding how this process of interpretation and reinterpretation functions, it should be possible to understand how hybrid representations communicate content to an observer and how images were designed to function in and between different social groups. Crucial to this process are the observers’ recollections of similar instances in other media, which are used to reproduce specific ideas from The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture, edited by Jeb J. Card. Center for Archaeological Investigations , Occasional Paper No. 39. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-8093-3314-1. 450 C. M. Roberts a static form. Representations are designed to indicate and recall specific past instances, potentially allowing a contemporary observer to make some fruitful suggestions regarding the nature of culture contact in the past, as reflected by artistic hybridization. Two different instances when Mediterranean concepts of stone sculpture were adopted in temperate Europe will be examined: the appearance of large freestanding stone sculptures in the middle of the first millennium b.c., and the development of Romano-British sculpture in the first few centuries a.d. In each of these, the medium of stone was deliberately shaped to create the idea of a person in the mind of a viewer. Examination of these processes suggests methods by which the way hybrid images communicate content can be used to interpret past social situations. Reflecting on the Image To use images as evidence of cultural contact, we must make a link between the material we can observe and the social practices we cannot. Images participate in a process of interpretation because their makers intended them to reproduce a specific version of reality in the minds of those who observe them (Gell 1998). Poststructural theories on the creation and interpretation of meaning can link the act of transforming a material medium into a representation to social practices. According to critics and philosophers such as Jacques Derrida (e.g., 1987), Julie Kristeva (e.g., 1984, 1986), and Roland Barthes (e.g., 1977; see also Eco 1990), each act of viewing or reading takes place in reference to a host of prior experiences . This idea is most explicit in Kristeva’s (1984:60, 1986) literary model of transposition (or intertextuality), in which she argues that we interpret words, motifs, and scenes based not only on the example with which we are currently engaged but also on all past engagements we have had with similar instances in other texts. For Kristeva, texts are never finite but are instead open to constant reinterpretation, as different readers constantly transpose personal experiences with certain words and themes from other texts into each act of interpretation. Alfred Gell (1998) suggested that artists combat such freedom of interpretation by imbuing their creations with the intent of their makers (see also Tolkien 1994:xvii). Gell argues that this act gives objects a form of secondary agency in the sense that they act to limit interpretation. It is within this tension—between the desire of an author to create a physical representation of specific ideas and a viewer’s ability to alter these messages in accord with his or her own unique past experiences—that a means to study the process of hybridization can be found. If we understand images to...