This book draws on the complementary fields of visual cultural studies and interpretative archaeology to examine how successive generations transformed their visual culture to construct themselves. It explores this process through an extended case-study of art and social life in prehistoric south-east Italy, between the Upper Palaeolithic and the Bronze Age. A central argument of the book is that a wide range of visually communicative artworks were consumed and produced in the cultural process. Such objects range from portable artefacts, to installations within sites, to monumental structures in the landscape - all of which were interwoven with people's bodies in the experiences of daily life and special performances. More specifically, it is argued that these powerful aesthetic objects were actively used by people across space and time to perceive the world around them and to reproduce their social lives. They helped people to establish personal and collective boundaries, identities and relationships, to acquire and exercise power, to promote ideologies, and to contest them, especially at time of social tension.

Robin Skeates is Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, University of Durham. He works within the related fields of material culture, museum and heritage studies. He is the author of Debating the Archaeological Heritage (Duckworth 2000).