Join anthropological archaeologist Dr. Alex W. Barker as he explores how ancient iconography can be used to reconstruct what systems of objects conveyed to their viewers, and not only what these objects mean, but more importantly, how they mean.
Interpreting meaning in art is always perilous, even in familiar contexts where we know the artist, his or her views and writings about a work, the social and political context in which it was created, and how the work was received by its intended audiences. In prehistoric contexts like Spiro, where the artist is unknown, their beliefs conjectural, contexts debatable, and reception at best imagined and at worst unknowable, how can we find meanings that are more than just-so stories?
Dr. Barker is Director of the Arkansas Archeological Survey. He previously served as Director of the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri; Curator of North American Archaeology and Vice President for Collections, Research and Exhibitions at the Milwaukee Public Museum; and, many years ago, as Curator of Archaeology at the Dallas Museum of Natural History (now the Perot Museum). He’s past President of the American Anthropological Association, a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and a graduate of the Getty Museum Leadership Institute. He was an Obama-era appointee to the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Review Committee, and he is a peer-elected Expert Member of two ICOMOS (International Council of Monuments and Sites) International Scientific Committees, ISC for Archaeology and Heritage Management and ISC for Earthen Architectural Heritage.
In 2002 he led a team of researchers who demonstrated that a scraper from the Spiro site, now at the Smithsonian, had been made from obsidian from the Sierra de Pachuca source outside Mexico City—the first direct evidence for Mesoamerican material from Mississippian contexts after more than two centuries of speculation.
This lecture is in conjunction with the Spirit Lodge: Mississippian Art from Spiro exhibition.
Presented by the Boshell Family Lecture Series on Archaeology
Image: Effigy pipe of seated male figure, known as Resting Warrior or Big Boy, and identified as Morning Star or the hero Red Horn, Leflore County, Oklahoma, Spiro site, 1100–1200. Bauxite (flint clay). Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Museum, 47-2-1. Image courtesy The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Media Services. Photo: John Lamberton.
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