Archaeology of Idols

ANTH W4065  (Barnard College, Columbia University)

"Archaeology of Idols" explores 40,000 years of the human creation of, entanglement with, enchantment by, and violence toward images. Case studies roam from the Paleolithic to Petra and from the Hopi to the Taliban, all the while placing the sculpted, painted or otherwise constructed devotional objects of archaeology into dialogue with contemporary social theory on the problem of representation, iconoclash, fetishism and the sacred. Archaeological texts by David Lewis-Williams, Lynn Meskell and Zainab Bahrani are paired with writings by W. J. T. Mitchell, Alfred Gell, David Freedberg and George Bataille as part of a larger project designed to build an archaeological iconology that seeks to understand why humans have always been such prolific makers and breakers of idols. Our goal, then, is not a representative survey of human-idol relations in an particular time or place let alone in prehistory generally. Rather, our investigations make strategic and selective leaps that highlight idolatry as a basic aspect of the human experience.