Minoan material culture, produced on Crete during the Bronze Age, has long been appreciated for its vivid and abundant depictions of animals. Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the palatial site of Knossos at the start of the twentieth century, helped shape scholars’ interpretations of these animal depictions, noting their ‘brilliant naturalism’ (Evans, Reference Evans1921: 28). This characterization provides the starting point for Anderson’s monograph (p. 2) since it has become central to the definition of Minoan culture and yet remains underexplored. Rather than treating these depictions of animals as primarily representational or symbolic, Anderson seeks to understand them in terms of their relationships with other bodies and things. This relational approach leads her to adopt the term ‘animalian things’ as a means to reposition these various forms not as reflections of something else but put them at the centre of the action. As she argues (p. 31), ‘people would have directly encountered animals not only as fleshy corpora but also as crafted embodiments’.
One of the problems that scholars of Minoan Crete grapple with is that depictions of animals and (less frequently) humans in a variety of media seem to offer the primary means to understand the society that produced them, yet no one can agree what they mean (Cain, Reference Cain2001). In the absence of decipherable texts until the final phase of this palatial society, its rich visual culture provides an alternative way of approaching questions of social organisation, gender relations, or overseas trade. Anderson eschews this approach almost entirely, other than briefly situating the reader in the chronological period which a group of related objects come from. Instead, she adopts a method of close, often lyrical, description of particular objects, which allows her to trace the connections between different things. Fortunately, the book is richly illustrated since she focuses on a variety of things, some well-known, others less so, and highlights significant details which allow her to develop the basis for her arguments of relatedness. One useful concept she introduces is what she terms ‘formal assonance’, whereby similarities in depiction demonstrate connections between entities which we might not otherwise grasp. It is by drawing the reader’s attention to these details that she opens up a new way of looking at particular objects. These observations are allied to a variety of theoretical influences, discussed and generously acknowledged in the first chapter, which also clearly sets out the approach of the book.
Anderson’s first group of objects is zoomorphic rhyta from the Prepalatial and later periods. These are containers of liquids with animal or human form, although various holes allow liquids to flow through them (the term rhyton derives from the Greek verb to flow). She suggests that although they have different shapes, they share a self-sufficiency or autonomy that distinguishes them from other vessels. Here, as elsewhere, the ‘animalian’ is not strictly something with animal form but rather an object that blurs the lines between body and thing. These rhyta are described as animalian because, particularly when filled with liquid, they have capacities which allow them to behave more like a body: the holes act like orifices. From this point of view, here, and elsewhere, ‘animalian’ becomes allied with animacy rather than animals per se. In the context of the book this makes sense as a theoretical manoeuvre to refocus attention on the role of things or objects but correspondingly shifts attention away from the role of animals themselves. Anderson is fully aware of this but suggests that her perspective is complementary with those that are more centred on human-animal relations (Shapland, Reference Shapland2022).
Anderson moves on to a discussion of lions in material culture, going over some of the same ground as her previous work on the subject (Anderson Reference Anderson2016; Reference Anderson2020). She makes the important point that on an island without such large predators, people’s interactions with lions were almost exclusively with depictions of them rather than the animals themselves. Rather than seeing objects, such as sealstones, as mediating encounters with lions (as I have; Shapland Reference Shapland2010) she aligns them more with the oral poetry about lions that she argues was already circulating in the Bronze Age. From this point of view, seals become ‘poetic fabrications’, connecting people and lions in an analogous way to the Homeric similes which she sees as a later echo of these things. In this way she subverts the standard approach of reading objects like texts by suggesting that similes equating human and lion could have originated with the wearing of such seals, so that the poetic form is derivative of the relations established by the object.
This notion of fabrication is applied in Chapter 4 to what are often seen as ‘composite’ animals, which are regarded instead as fully embodied creatures that exist only in material culture. Prominent among these is the griffin, and Anderson traces the development of this particular animalian body over the course of the palatial periods. While this focus on griffins as existent entities (as opposed to products of the human imagination) is convincing, this chapter also reveals a potential weakness in Anderson’s method of tracing formal similarities between depictions and out into the world. By illustrating the head of a bearded vulture taken with a modern telephoto lens next to drawings of Bronze Age seals depicting griffins and flying birds she aims to demonstrate the connections between the bearded tuft and chest markings of each. Though the similarity is undeniable, the actual connection is not because it is based on formal resemblance rather than a relatedness grounded in a Bronze Age context. There are distinct differences too, notably the frequently shown crest of the griffin, which she derives instead from owls. Although bearded vultures still fly around the mountains of Crete, Anderson’s suggestion that the similarities ‘would have constituted grounds for a link to be made by inhabitants of Crete between the two Aegean species—between the griffin experienced in stone and clay, and a vulture experienced in feather and flesh’ (p. 195), remains hypothetical as she accepts. By contrast, the connections she draws between roughly contemporary seals and frescoes are secured by a common context of fabrication: the book’s strength is in tracing this web of interconnected material culture.
Chapter 5 further stretches the boundaries of ‘animalian things’ by focussing on three types of things derived from animal products: the boar’s tusk helmet, the figure-of-eight shield, and the ship canopies known as ikria. The last two are clearly shown as being made from oxhide. It is here that the concept of formal assonance usefully draws in other related forms such as boar’s heads and even the bulbs of sea squills. Anderson considers how conventions of depiction, particularly forms shown in series, help to establish these connections. At the same time, she considers how the affordances of particular media, including seals and painted vessels, present these connections in certain ways.
The final chapter shifts to another medium, wall painting, which provides these ‘animalian entities’ with large colourful presences. Inevitably, given the superior preservation conditions, the focus is on the Theran frescoes. Anderson convincingly considers how the painters played on the interaction between the represented space and the architectural space to create ambiguous and perhaps unsettling relations between the viewer and the animalian thing. She usefully returns to entities such as griffins and ikria, here depicted approximately life-size, in order to consider how scale affects the way they were perceived. This is refreshingly different from more traditional accounts that seek to fit these frescoes within a set of symbolic meanings or vignettes of daily life.
By using close looking as a starting point for discussions of Minoan animal depictions, Anderson opens up a new angle on a familiar topic. Rather than using them as evidence for human society, she centres these ‘animalian things’ as the subject of critical scrutiny. In this way she shows how a broadly art historical approach, infused with the new materialism, provides important insights into the role of things which are often regarded as symbolic or ornamental. Although many of these depictions have been discussed by generations of Minoan archaeologists, Anderson shows how they can be considered anew on their own terms. Her book provides a distinctive contribution to an increasing number of theoretically informed discussions of Aegean Bronze Age art, although this not a term that Anderson would necessarily subscribe to. Following in the tradition of Alfred Gell (Reference Gell1998), Anderson asks what these things do, and also how they relate to one another. Her answer constitutes a rich and engaging discussion of animalian things which captures them in their multifarious complexity.
