Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins

  • Stephanie Moser
Sutton: 1998. 200pp £25
Naked aggression: artistic tradition has governed the way primitive peoples are depicted over a long period, as in this sixteenth-century watercolour.

Boring pages of text can be brought to life by illustrations. This is an old and widespread view. Pictures — in this perception — add to the readability of verbal communication and provide additional clarity. Scientific illustrations are no exception to this rule, elucidating and animating what in many instances is dense and turgid prose. Drawings, woodcuts, engravings, lithographs and photographs have successively found their way into mediaeval illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance anatomy texts, early-modern natural philosophy books and late-modern scientific literature.

In recent years, scientific illustrations have begun to be looked at in a different way, however. Historians of science, art historians, palaeontologists, archaeologists and others have started to pay more serious attention to pictures and to regard them as not merely a means to elucidate and enliven the written word, but as a significant form of communication in their own right.

Illustrations have their peculiar iconographic idiom and communicate information that may be different from that of the accompanying text and, what is more, may enter territory that is off limits to verbal communication. Visual images, moreover, can have a powerful impact on the mind and insidiously impart cultural and other prejudices, not fit to be expressed in words, or reveal details for which no scientific evidence is available. The recognition of these and other functions of non-verbal communication in the sciences has led to the lively new discipline of ‘visual communication’, encompassing, in addition to illustrations, three-dimensional models and such museum displays as habitat dioramas.

One archaeologist who has taken a lead in the study of science's visual language is Stephanie Moser, who teaches at the University of Southampton. Having become sensitized to the subtle power of visual communication by an interest in the gender assumptions of archaeological reconstructions, she extended the range of her expertise to include the topic of visual representation of human prehistory in general. The fruit of this is this splendid book, which focuses on Victorian and twentieth-century scientific illustrations of the origins and early history of humans.

Among the examples Moser discusses are illustrations by Emile Bayard for Louis Figuier's L'homme primitif (1870), by Cecil Aldin for H. N. Hutchinson's Prehistoric Man and Beast (1896) and paintings by Zdenek Burian for his and Josef Augusta's Prehistoric Man (1960). We may think that our perception of human prehistory is based on excavated fossils, artefacts and other prehistoric remnants — that the classic works by T. H. Huxley, Carl Vogt, Charles Darwin or Charles Lyell on human antiquity and evolution shaped our ancestral images. Moser, however, maintains that the way we visualize ‘primitive man’ is significantly conditioned by artistic representations that draw on a multitude of different and pre-scientific iconographic traditions.

One important question in studying visual representation in the sciences has been that of the relative importance of ‘form’ and ‘function’. In other words, are features of apparent scientific content not, in fact, a product of artistic style and iconographic tradition? Moser emphatically comes down on the side of the formalists. Her fascinating and challenging thesis is that late-modern, scientific visualizations of human origins retained emblematic or iconographic elements from pre-scientific traditions of representation, going back to early-modern and Renaissance, mediaeval, early Christian and even Graeco-Roman imagery — “As early as the classical period the roots of a visual tradition for depicting prehistory were established.”

There was an artistic tradition of showing primitiveness that existed millennia before Victorian palaeoanthropology. Various elements entered the visual language about primaeval humankind that served to construct a relationship of progress and of superiority of ‘us’ over ‘them’. Among these elements were nakedness, the wearing of animal skins, hirsuteness and the presence of gnarled clubs. How many of us know that there is no factual evidence for the club “that any design-conscious Neanderthal simply must carry as an accessory”?

It might seem churlish to point out omissions in a book that offers such a rich and colourful palette of topics. Yet inasmuch as chapter one professes to present the main developments in scientific visualization, it might for the sake of completeness be appropriate to mention an oversight, namely that of the Humboldtian revolution in scientific visualization. Alexander von Humboldt's altitude-latitude representations of the distribution of vegetation, his reinvention of the isoline and his insistence on the significance of landscape perception led to a proliferation of scientific visual representations, in atlases, textbooks and so on. Ethnology and archaeology, too, were caught up in this maelstrom of Humboldtian visualization.

This is an enjoyable piece of scholarship in which the author convincingly argues that our ideas about the human past have in part been shaped by the visual arts. Moser's book is complemented by a spirited foreword by Clive Gamble, who stresses the independence from scientific discoveries of pictorial reconstruction in palaeoanthropology and points to their gendered, male-centred nature. Moser's lavishly illustrated book is accessible to a wide readership and would make a fine Christmas present.