Architectural Guide to Sub-Saharan Africa, by Philipp Meuser and Adil Dalbai (eds.)

Abstract

excavated, revered, and remembered these mural paintings. Trever concludes her study by reflecting back on the innovative history of Moche murals that she has assembled. She is ada­ mant—and I heartily agree with her here— that “archaeology and art history need each other” (182). That said, I don’t know if the terms “archaeo art history” or “archaeo­iconology” will take off in either discipline. Those of us who work in the world of pre­Columbian studies are well aware of colleagues keen to police the bound­ aries of their disciplines. There are certain col­ leagues in art history who dismiss the work of other art historians as “too archaeological,” even while these same disparaged art histori­ ans are toiling in the field alongside certain archaeologists who deride their work as “too art historical,” too “bereft of data.” (I was once introduced by a senior Mesoamerican archae­ ologist, before delivering a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, as “blissfully unencumbered by data.”) These tensions are not new. At the “Theory, Method, and The Future of Pre­ Columbian Art History” session organized by Cecilia Klein for the 100th Annual Conference of the College Art Association in Los Angeles in 2010, Tom Cummins opined that pre­Columbian art historians should “remember that we are not archaeologists or anthropologists. We are art historians and while we may often use some of the methods of our allied fields, we are not performing the same thing.”3 Trever’s terms are important because they engage with these points of contention and offer a way of countering limitations that are often as semantic as they are meth­ odological, of turning ideological shortsight­ edness on its head, of moving past tired, and sometimes barren, debates. Attempting to tease apart the art historical from the archae­ ological in this study would be folly. It would also miss Trever’s larger point, which is that the story of Moche murals, in all of its glory and complexity, can best be told by adopting an interdisciplinary and multimodal approach. At any rate, this thought­provok­ ing book does far more than coin new terms: it provides a new and exciting roadmap for art historians of premodern societies. Trever’s book is far less concerned with policing dis­ ciplinary boundaries than it is with showing how the methods of art history can be pro­ ductively set in dialogue with an array of data and vantage points.