impact on the field. More inhibiting have been a variety of internal factors, in particular ignorance of key aspects of how art was conceived and made in Mesopotamia: the lack of virtually any basis for attributing works to individual hands or names, which has forced the reconstruction of broader styles, schools, and traditions; ignorance of the functional priorities of the artist (ritual, propagandistic, apotropaic, etc.) vis-à-vis any artistic/aesthetic ambitions; ignorance of the degree of artistic latitude allowed to artists (minimal?); ignorance of the aesthetic and other categories in which they conceived the success or failure of a work of art (an area now being profitably investigated by I. Winter); and, perhaps most compromising of all, an inability in most contexts to define criteria for distinguishing conscious difference of style from unintentional difference of quality (or conception or execution). This leads to arbitrary and subjective value judgments, as in the common postulate of “crude” or “schematic” styles, when it is not clear that style is involved at all, but rather competence.

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Gold helmet, Mesopotamia, ca. 2500 B.C.

(Image Select)

Most of what goes under the name of art history in Mesopotamian studies has been in the nature of iconographical and typological analysis, often with a view to defining period, cultural, ethnic, or regional styles, and thence to tracing patterns of influence and diffusion. Under the circumstances this is often all that can be done, and it has yielded many significant results. But it is considerably coarser-grained and often more speculative than art history in the sense that this discipline is generally understood.

Timothy Potts

See also

Bell, Gertrude

References

Curtis, J.E. 1982. Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery, The Work of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1932–1982. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

Groenewegen-Frankfort, H.A. 1951. Arrest and Movement: An Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Near East. London: Faber and Faber.

Harper, P. O., et al., eds. 1995. Assyrian Origins, Discoveries at Ashur on the Tigris. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Hilprecht, H.V. 1903. Explorations in Bible Lands during the 19th Century. Philadelphia: A.J. Holman.

Kuklick, B. 1996. Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880–1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Larsen, M.T. 1996. The Conquest of Assyria, Excavations in an Antique Land 1840–1860. London and New York: Routledge.

Lloyd, S. 1963. Mounds of the Near East. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

———. 1980. Foundations in the Dust, The Story of Mesopotamian Discovery. Rev. ed. London: Thames and Hudson.

Wengrow, D. 1999. “The Intellectual Adventure of Henri Frankfort: A Missing Chapter in the History of Archaeological Thought.” American Journal of Archaeology 103, no. 4: 597–613.

Mexico

Archaeological research in Mexico has a long, complex history covering over 150 years and the careers of hundreds of archaeologists. Part of this history has been summarized in fairly recent surveys (Bernal 1979; García Mora et al. 1987–1989; Willey and Sabloff 1980), but much of it remains to be written. This article examines some of the central developments in Mexican archaeology with an emphasis on the work since 1940 when the quantity and types of investigations increased at an accelerated pace.

The evolution of Mexican archaeology as a scientific discipline generally has been closely