A revolutionary approach to how we view Europe's prehistoric culture
The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the
Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of
goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate
rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world
of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from
those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized
societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and
cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman
Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how
they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions
through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments
they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their
ritual places--and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their
experience.
How Ancient Europeans Saw the World offers a completely new approach
to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major
challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book
demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's
pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged
their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their
art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must
view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by
the ancient peoples who fashioned them.
