Beyond Attribution. Style and Communication in the Visual Culture of the Late Bronze and Iron Age Near East

Abstract

The concept of style has been central to art history and archaeology for most of their disciplinary history but has faced serious critique, especially since the 1960s. While some scholars argue for moving beyond style, others maintain its heuristic value. In the context of ancient Near Eastern archaeology and related disciplines, stylistic analysis has always played a vital role, while still oscillating between promise and challenge. Stylistic analysis has been crucial for questions of attribution, i. e. of origins, workshops, craftspeople, dates, contacts, and more. Recent scholarly perspectives have proposed alternative frameworks, such as understanding stylistic similarities as products of historically contingent communities of shared practices. The intertwined relationship between medium, style and meaning has also become an increasingly vital topic. This volume and the 2021 virtual conference on which it is based aimed to explore these developments and encourage discussion of style beyond (mere) attribution. The assembled papers concentrate on the highly interconnected visual cultures of the Late Bronze and Iron Age Near East, but also include a perspective from prehistoric European archaeology. Common themes of power dynamics in the production and consumption of style, rhetorical uses of style for ideological, aesthetic, or programmatic ends, and the embodiment of stylistic production emerge from these contributions. The final chapters take a historiographic view, assessing how far the connoisseurial approaches of the past have taken us and where the future of visual inquiry will lead.