Online Salon with Severin Fowles: The Interpretation of Ancestral Pueblo Rock Art

Humans have produced images for tens of thousands of years; indeed, image production is regarded as a universal undertaking, shared by all known societies. But cultural understandings of what images are-of how they work and of the powers they unleash-have varied widely through time and across social traditions. In this presentation, Fowles will consider a stunning revolution in image production that unfolded in the American Southwest after about 4,000 years ago, hand-in-hand with the spread of agriculture. As decades of research has demonstrated, farmers produced fundamentally different sorts of images than the hunter-gatherers who preceded them. Through an analysis of the rock art of northern New Mexico, Fowles seeks to clarify this difference, to define the ways in which it was revolutionary, and to offer a general account of the relationship between image production and agricultural production.
Severin Fowles was SAR’s 2014-2015 Weatherhead Resident Scholar: sarweb.org/sch...
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About the School for Advanced Research (SAR): Founded in 1907, the School for Advanced Research (SAR) is one of North America’s preeminent independent institutes for the study of anthropology, related social sciences and humanities. SAR is home to the Indian Arts Research Center, one of the nation’s most important Southwest Native American art research collections. Through prestigious scholar residency and artist fellowship programs, public programs and SAR Press, SAR advances intellectual inquiry in order to better understand humankind in an increasingly global and interconnected world. Additional information on the work of our resident scholars and Native American artists is available on the SAR website: sarweb.org/, on Facebook: / schoolforadv.. , and on Twitter: @schadvresearch.