Breaking the Surface An Art/Archaeology of Prehistoric Architecture

by Bailey, Doug

• ISBN13: 9780190611873
• ISBN10: 0190611871
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780190886424
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-06-12
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, offering detailed critiques of current interpretations of these earliest European architectural constructions.

The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Magura in Romania), with the work of three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with cultural diversity in framing spatial reference and through an examination of pre-modern ungrounded ways of living. Breaking the Surface is as much a creative act on its own-in its mixture of work from disparate periods and regions, its use of radical text interruption, and its juxtaposition of text and imagery-as it is an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture. Unflinching and exhilarating, it is a major development in the growing subdiscipline of art/archaeology.

Author Biography

Doug Bailey is Professor of Visual Archaeology and Anthropology at San Francisco State University.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Preface

Chapter 1: Cutting pit-houses: function, deposition, questions not asked
Chapter 2: Cutting skin: Ron Athey's Four Scenes (AD 1994)
Chapter 3: Cutting holes: philosophy and psychology

Inter-text A

Chapter 4: Cutting deep: Bronze Age Wilsford (1200 cal. BC)
Chapter 5: Cutting buildings: Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (AD 1975)
Chapter 6: Cutting words: linguistic anthropology

Inter-text B

Chapter 7: Cutting the ground: Neolithic Etton (3800 cal. BC)
Chapter 8: Cutting space: Lucio Fontana's tagli and buchi (AD 1950s and 1960s)
Chapter 9: Cutting absolute worlds: grounded frames of reference

Inter-text C

Appendix
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index