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