Style and Configuration in Prehistoric Iconography by V.J. Knight, Jr.

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Style and Configuration in Prehistoric

Iconography

Vernon James Knight Jr.

Abstract

Te iconography o ancient art has to do with making propositions

about what that art depicts. Stylistic studies, in contrast, make prop-

ositions about the sharedness o ormal properties with other objects.

Tese can be done separately. Although many iconographic analyses

o ancient art proceed with little or no consideration o style, I argue

that the two modes o analysis are interdependent. I offer a method-

ological case that stylistic analysis is logically prior to iconographic

study in the domain o ancient art. Tis observation argues or a dis-

tinctively staged approach to the iconography o ancient objects, one

in which detailed stylistic study is a necessary prerequisite to success

in determining the reerents o representations.

In this chapter, I wish to make what is really a airly simple meth-

odological point concerning the relationship between the iconogra-

phy o ancient art and the study o style. I think the point is worth

making because I have ound that there is ar less consensus about

method among prehistoric iconographers than many would readily

admit. I argue that stylistic and iconographic analyses are interde-

pendent and that stylistic analysis is an indispensable prerequisiteto a more confident, successul iconography. Tis suggests, in turn, a

staged methodology incorporating both.



V E R N O N J A M E S K N I G H T J R .224

Beore going any urther, let me situate mysel, so to speak, in

order to reveal some o my biases. In the New World, pre-Colum-bian iconography o art is divided between two sets o practitio-

ners: one trained in the field o art history and a somewhat larger

group trained as anthropologists. Tese two groups, however crisply

divided by their training, nevertheless do interact extensively and

borrow methodologically rom one another. Personally, by training

I am an anthropologist, one who works in eastern North America

and the Greater Antilles. Further, I am one o the original memberso the Mississippian Iconographic Workshop, originally a spinoff o

Linda Schele’s Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop, which has met annu-

ally since 1993 in exas. At the moment, the group is responsible or

three edited volumes (Lankord, Reilly, and Garber 2011; Reilly and

Garber 2007; ownsend and Sharp 2004) and a number o additional

articles. My interest in methods is resh in that I spent the greater

part o 2010 working on a book manuscript on the subject (Knight

2013), having received a stipend or that purpose by Dumbarton

Oaks in Washington, DC; I have taught the subject as a graduate

seminar or twenty years.

As or my theoretical perspective, it comes ultimately rom a

background in symbolic and structural anthropology acquired

during the 1970s. My view o the nature and role o culture has a

great deal in common with cognitive anthropology as outlined by

D’Andrade (1987) and others. In short, I view both style and icono-

graphic communication as governed by schematic cultural models

o differentially distributed knowledge.

Iconography is undamentally about the relationship between

representational images and whatever they reer to, outside o them-

selves. I use the term referent intentionally, as opposed to the moreslippery term meaning . Iconography is thereore completely differ-

ent rom the study o style (Panosky 1939), which has to do with



S T Y L E A N D C O N F I G U R A T I O N I N P R E H I S T O R I C

I C O N O G R A P H Y

225

cultural models governing the manner in which images are depicted.

I urther restrict mysel to the iconography o prehistoric images.Tese are images to which any contemporaneously written record

is completely denied. Te subject matter thereore includes imagery

produced by such pre-Columbian groups as the Olmec, eotihuacán,

and Izapa o ancient Mexico, Coclé o Panama, the Marajoara o

the Amazon Basin, the Chavín and Moche o Peru, and many oth-

ers. Tese ancient peoples, all o whom lef a wonderul variety o

art or our modern contemplation, have in common that they wereorganized as what most archaeologists would call “complex societ-

ies,” meaning simply that they were socially differentiated to some

degree, and their communities were politically organized. I exclude

such groups as the Classic Maya, who had a well-developed glotto-

graphic writing system. In Classic Maya art, imagery is ofen com-

bined directly with text so that the burden o communication is

shared. Tis creates entirely new genres (e.g., Berlo 1983), and in a

very real sense, it changes the rules o iconographic interpretation.

Further, iconography can be considered a subset o cognitive archae-

ology, although our practice diverges very much rom standard

descriptions o what cognitive archaeology is by such worthies as

Colin Renrew (1994), Kent Flannery, and Joyce Marcus (1998). From

the art historical perspective, what we are doing could be considered

a acet o what Erwin Panosky (1939) called “iconology,” although

Panosky himsel might not recognize it as that, were he alive today.

I claim that where ancient images are at stake, there is a special

methodological relationship between the study o styles and the

study o representations. Let me introduce the matter with a para-

dox. In North and South America respectively, among the most

proound sources o iconographic insights published to date are tworesearch projects. First, or North America, is Philip Phillips’s and

James Brown’s (1975-1982) magnificent six-volume set concerning




the corpus o Mississippian engraved shells rom the Craig Mound

at the Spiro site in Oklahoma. For South America, the correspond-ing work is the extraordinarily influential two-volume set on Moche

fineline painted ceramics by Christopher Donnan, Donna McClel-

land, and Donald McClelland (Donnan and McClelland 1999;

McClelland, and Donnan 2007). Tese two studies have much in

common, including the sheer amount o labor that went into col-

lecting the corpus in both, a methodological imperative inher-

ited rom art history (Kubler 1967, 1969). Te Spiro shell volumesbrought together 791 artiacts, presented in a common ormat, as

rubbings gathered rom numerous scattered collections by a team

o our artists working over a six-year period. Te Moche fineline

pottery database is even more impressive in this regard. It is a photo-

graphic archive documenting over 2,300 pottery vessels rom muse-

ums and private collections worldwide assembled over a period o

thirty years. As many as twenty to thirty photographs o each ves-

sel were taken. Because these paintings were most ofen done in the

round, or the purpose o analysis and publication, the photographed

paintings were converted into inked two-dimensional rollouts. Te

paradox concerning these volumes is as ollows. Although both the

North and South American studies have been extraordinarily ertile

sources o iconographic interpretation in the years since their publi-

cation, neither study mainly concerns iconography. Instead, they are

undamentally stylistic studies, which subdivide their materials into

style groups and style phases using ormal traits o execution and

layout. Teir concern with the subject matter o the art is secondary

in both cases, and its discussion develops only afer sufficient control

o style and stylistic change over time has been achieved. Both stud-

ies are extraordinarily conservative in regard to interpretation o theimagery, especially in their shared disavowal o any sort o ethno-

graphic analogy to help interpret what is being depicted.





227

Te importance o this is that many o the attitudes expressed in

these volumes are at odds with dominant tendencies among practic-ing prehistoric iconographers. Many ignore the imperative to col-

lect a ull corpus o a single genre beore proceeding. Instead, they

are content to move interpretively rom object to object, skip rom

genre to genre, and ollow alleged motis or themes across great dis-

tances in time and space. Tey tend to employ ethnographic analogy

promiscuously, using documentation rom the ethnographic present

that they project backwards in time with little regard or the possi-bility that orms might become disjoined rom their subject matter

over time. In doing so, these practitioners appear satisfied to inter-

pret ancient images merely as illustrations o already known ethno-

graphic concepts. More to the point o this chapter, they tend to shun

the laborious work o stylistic analysis, preerring to jump headlong

into the arena o iconographic subject matter. Tey tend to assume

the existence o styles, especially so-called “international styles” such

as the Olmec or eotihuacano, where there has been no such ormal

demonstration. Even a casual look at such “styles” reveals enormous

diversity and complexity. I believe these shortcuts are a mistake and

that detailed stylistic analysis is methodologically essential as a pre-

cursor to practicing iconography with ancient images.

Beore zeroing in on this relationship more precisely, I need to

say just a bit about methodology in iconographic work itsel. In sim-

ple terms, like stylistic analysis, it begins with a collected corpus o

works o the same time period and ideally o the same genre. Insis-

tence on working within one genre at a time—say engraved shell

cups or fineline painted pots—echoes what the art historian Ernst

Gombrich (1972) called the “principle o the primacy o genres,”

which says that representations change as genres change. o takean extreme example, a representation o the Greek goddess Athena

on a coin is not to be compared with the image o Athena as the




central object o devotion in the Parthenon. Te reerents are very

different at anything other than a superficial level. With a corpus owork assembled in a ormat avorable to comparison, analysis begins

by deconstructing images into their parts, using a series o defined

suprastylistic concepts, such as salient element, moti, filler moti,

identiying attribute, classiying attribute, and ideograph. Most o

these terms come directly rom the vocabulary o art history, but

with definitions refined and tailored over the years to the tasks at

hand. By giving the discovered elements neutral names and by trac-ing their occurrences, relative positions, and clustering completely

throughout the corpus, one arrives at sets o apparent common sub-

ject matter. Depending on the circumstance, these sets are labeled

as visual themes and visual narratives and are again given neutral

names so as not to bias the outcome o analysis. Te art historian

George Kubler (1967, 1969) called this method “configurational

analysis.”

Importantly, configurational analysis is conducted entirely with-

out reerence to ethnographic analogy (or more accurately, his-

torical homology [Berlo 1983], since what is being compared are

chronologically distant maniestations o the same cultural phe-

nomena rather than merely analogous traits). Avoidance o historic

documentation at this stage o analysis is deliberate. Kubler (1969)

believed that historical disjunction between orm and reerent was

such a persistent danger that complete avoidance was the prudent

course. Nowadays, nearly all anthropologically trained iconogra-

phers, and probably most o the art historians as well, would not go

that ar. Tey would argue that historically recorded myths, rituals,

belies, cosmologies, and so orth grant an indispensable oothold

into the past. Methodologically then, the issue is to careully controlthe application o these later sources, to minimize the possibility o

simply reading the present into the past and irreversibly biasing the





229

outcome. Past configurations are, to some degree, allowed to speak

or themselves, being systematically compared with later inorma-tion, noting both what seems to fit and what does not. Procedurally,

the configurational analysis must both come first and must be ana-

lytically separate rom any consideration o historical homologies.

Because configurational analysis relies on internal inorma-

tion embedded within the images, it is air to ask to what degree

one can reliably say anything about subject matter and thereore do

iconography. Art historians o Panosky’s generation assumed thatsome kinds o subject matter recognition were universal, with ac-

tual understandings requiring no cultural knowledge. But a subse-

quent generation o theorists (e.g., Gombrich 1977; Hermerén 1969;

Kippenberg 1987) pointed out the allacy o actual recognition,

even in art that we might think o as being naturalistic. So clearly, in

images we see only what we are conditioned to see by shared cultural

models—in this case, stylistic models o depiction. On this basis,

Robert Layton (1977) has argued that there is no such thing as “natu-

ralism” in art; all depiction is conventionalized. Te one distinction

that can be made is the degree to which the style in question is, or

is not, obedient to perspective, in the sense o showing the contours

o what the eye sees rom a fixed vantage point. Some style systems

ignore perspective almost entirely.

Tus, our recognition o anything at all, iconographically,

depends on how much o the stylistic model in question we happen

to grasp. As in other aspects o iconography, success is largely a mat-

ter o knowing the context.

My contention is that stylistic and iconographic analyses are sep-

arate but interdependent endeavors. I am arguing that an explicit

grasp o the stylistic canons governing a corpus o related imagery isundamentally prerequisite to any successul iconographic analysis

o that corpus. o urther drive home this point, let us consider three




things essential to prehistoric iconography that a study o stylistic

conventions can tell us: what is what, what is contemporaneous withwhat, and what is local.

Figure 9.1. wo winged serpents, rom engraved pottery vessels rom the

Moundville site, Alabama ([a] rom Moore [1907, figure 59]; [b] drawing by Erin E.

Phillips). (Drawing and permission courtesy o Erin E. Phillips)

First, an understanding o stylistic conventions can tell us what

is what. Consider the two images given in figure 9.1, both drawn

rom the corpus o engraved pottery in the Hemphill style rom the

Moundville site in Alabama. Arguably, these Mississippian engrav-

ings depict the same theme, which is a winged serpent. Te upper-

most is a well-known illustration. It was published by Clarence B.

Moore in 1907, and it has been occasionally reproduced in publica-

tions ever since. At times, this particular snake has been reerred toin figure captions as a “plumed serpent,” with the objects on the head

viewed as eathers. Te unspoken comparison here is obviously with





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the “eathered serpents” o Mesoamerica. Te lower image, in con-

trast, is commonly understood as “horned,” with the correspondingobjects on the head seen as antlers. Again, there is an unspoken com-

parison, in this case with the horned underwater serpents o Native

American myth in the eastern United States. Te question is, does

the upper configuration really depict plumes, or instead is it merely

another convention or antlers?

Fortunately, we have a comparative stylistic study o all thirty-

nine known winged serpent depictions rom Moundville (Schatte1997), and that study reveals the answer. It gives us empirical grounds

to state with complete confidence that all such configurations on the

head are to be interpreted as the same thing (antlers), which show

a ull range o schematization rom ully to barely recognizable. It

so happens that the lower example is chronologically early and the

upper is late (E. Phillips 2011). Viewing images in isolation leads

to incorrect conclusions, but systematic stylistic study o an entire

corpus reveals a continuous range o conventional depiction. Figure

9.2 provides a second illustration o the idea, again taken rom the

engraved art on pottery rom Moundville. I once gave a talk where

I used this drawing to illustrate another o the common themes on

Moundville pottery, which we call the crested bird. As I was explain-

ing that this does, in act, depict the head o a crested bird, a gentle-

man in the back o the audience raised an objection. While he saw

that it could be a crested bird, he thought it much more likely to

depict a fish in the process o consuming something large. He was

seeing the hachures at the border between the beak and head as the

teeth o a fish, and the crest as the fish’s dorsal fin. And rankly, i

this were the only image we had o the subject, his interpretation

could be as easily deended as mine. Obviously, we do not all neces-sarily see the same thing. In my case, i I had been armed at that

moment with the ull repertoire o engravings o the crested bird




theme, I could have explained the stylistic canons that govern its

depiction. Because the remaining examples o the crested bird themeshow nothing even remotely fish-like, my case could easily have been

made. Even in cases where the analyst cannot identiy the natural

reerent, stylistic analysis can still allow us to make inormed choices

about what is the same subject versus what is something else. Style

inorms the critical same-versus-different distinctions that make

iconography possible.

Figure 9.2. Detail rom a depiction o a crested bird on engraved pottery rom theMoundville site, Alabama (Moore 1905, figure 9). (Image in the public domain)

Second, style helps us to decide what is contemporaneous with

what. Stylistic seriation is an indispensable tool or arranging images

in a chronology. Te creation o style phases within traditions grants

us “analytical moments” so to speak—synchronic units that give us

a ramework within which we can capture the local, potentially tem-porary, relations between images and their reerents. Our recogni-

tion o style horizons also allows us to link contemporaneous works





233

across larger geographical spans in order to consider whether their

reerents are the same or different. Conversely, a lack o attention tothese details can lead only to jumbled comparisons o images drawn

rom different times and places, leading to alse assumptions about

continuity o orms and reerents. In short, iconography is meaning-

less without the control o time, and style is a major contributor to

the building o chronologies.

Tird, stylistic analysis can tell us what is local. Prehistoric com-

plex societies were not isolated systems. In these societies, skillullycrafed goods were ofen sought rom aar, or perhaps brought as

gifs by emissaries seeking alliance. Nonlocal goods were ultimately

distributed among both elites and non-elites, during easts, mar-

riages, unerals, and other consequential social events. As a result,

the total assemblage o portable imagery at any given site, particu-

larly at large civic-ceremonial centers, is a mix o goods produced

locally and goods manuactured elsewhere. Among these nonlocal

goods, typically there are images that not only are oreign to the local

style but also bear subject matter that would have had no particular

significance in the local context. In any effort to isolate local sys-

tems o images and reerents, as a practical matter it is necessary to

winnow out the nonlocal “noise,” simpliying the universe o images

and eliminating rom consideration much that would otherwise

conound the analysis. Among the key tools or accomplishing this

winnowing out o the oreign material is stylistic analysis (another

being the chemical or geological sourcing o raw materials). Con-

sider the two large stone effigy smoking pipes shown in photograph

9.1, depicting a supernatural panther. Although our such pipes have

been ound at the Moundville site in west Alabama, stylistically they

are out o place. Tey do not belong to any o Moundville’s styles,but rather to a style known as Bellaire A that properly belongs in

the Lower Mississippi Valley (Steponaitis et al. 2009), where many




more examples have been ound. In confirmation o this, the lime-

stone rom which they are made has been sourced to outcrops nearVicksburg on the Mississippi River. Not only are the objects oreign

at Moundville, but so is the subject matter. O the many hundreds o

locally produced images in several media at Moundville, none shows

the long-tailed panther. It is a oreign subject but one that was prob-

ably reinterpreted according to local cultural models and incorpo-

rated into Moundville ritual practice in a limited way.

Photograph 9.1. Limestone effigy pipes rom the Moundville site, Alabama, depict-

ing long-tailed panthers. (Photograph courtesy o Vincas Steponaitis)

In summary, style, as pure orm, can profitably be analyzed

entirely apart rom subject matter, and much work along these lines

has been done. Nonetheless, the results o stylistic analysis have much

to do with an understanding o reerents. Style has the potential to

inorm us on what is what, what is contemporaneous with what,

and what is local, all o which have a strong bearing on understand-ing suprastylistic configurations. In that sense, stylistic analysis is

logically prior to configurational analysis and any considerations o





235

iconographic reerence. Aspects o iconography thus have a meth-

odologically dependent relationship to aspects o style, just as con-figurational analysis o images is logically prior to the application

o historic homologies. All o this argues or a distinctly staged

approach to prehistoric iconography which is sometimes hinted at

and other times carried out in practice, but is seldom explicitly laid

out as I think it should be. I envision the ideal approach as having

several stages: first, assembly o the corpus; second, organization o

the material according to stylistic analysis; third, incorporation onatural history and archaeological field data; ourth, configurational

analysis o suprastylistic units; fifh, careul application o ethno-

graphic analogy; sixth, building o iconographic models; and sev-

enth, testing these iconographic models. Tis last is because, afer all,

we do have to veriy our claims.

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Style and Configuration in Prehistoric Iconography by V.J. Knight, Jr.

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Transcript of Style and Configuration in Prehistoric Iconography by V.J. Knight, Jr.