The rich premise of this book is that archaeological art—including cave art of Ice Age Europe—can be compared with art in the recent past, and that it is possible to use ideas from contemporary art criticism when analyzing prehistoric visual art and communication. By “prehistoric,” Liliana Janik means art predating written accounts communicated about the art itself, although she does not acknowledge the slight that some Indigenous people feel as a result of that word. By looking at the way in which both ancient and modern can be considered art and can be shown to communicate, we can enhance our understanding of the “origins and breadth of human artistic endeavor” (p. xii). I am all in favor of explorations of the relationships between archaeological art and those works we call art today, but the exploration must be done carefully.

One cannot have a book about art without pictures of the art, and Janik admirably includes works from Europe (including Russia), Africa, Asia (Japan), South America, and Australia. Her solution to the copyright problem—and presumably cost—was to engage an artist to copy, in uniform style, images of past and present art forms in black and white. This creates several problems, particularly with respect to size and detail. Some detail omitted by redrawing could have been crucial to the production of the art, and crucial to its interpretation by archaeologists.

The book has six substantive chapters: “How Contemporary Is Prehistoric Art?” (Chapter 1), “The Origins of Art” (Chapter 2), “The Gallery: Unveiling Visual Narrative” (Chapter 3), “Power of Display: The Artist and the Object” (Chapter 4), “Embodiment and Disembodiment: The Corporeality of Visual Art and Interwoven Landscapes” (Chapter 5), and “Portraiture and the Reverence of the Other” (Chapter 6). Each of these is divided into sections, and each chapter has its own bibliography. As an illustration of the sections and to make a further point, in Chapter 1, I would have expected discussion of counterarguments that “art” was invented in the eighteenth century, of recognition of the color restrictions in early paintings to earth tones or charcoal, of the problems about lines when art is redrawn, of the literature on pareidolia in archaeology, of the archaeology of the body and the problem of redrawn images not always representing details that support or oppose any argument about the image, and of the literature on motion in archaeological art and in photography. Many relevant major references are not cited. Some omissions might be strengths because they show an author stepping out of the mainstream, but not all. Some of the implications of these points show how the author's argument could have been made more forcefully.

The central point of Janik's argument is that judgments about art depend on the cultural context (on this, I side with her), and she could have made this point by exposing that it is the core of Larry Shiner's argument (The Invention of Art, 2001). Meaning comes from cultural background. In discussing female figurines from 25,000 years ago that have been discussed in the media as sexual objects, Janik ignores the demolition of the sexual argument (April Nowell and Melanie Chang, “Science, the Media, and Interpretations of Upper Paleolithic Figurines,” American Anthropologist 116:562–577, 2014) despite the fact that it derives partly from a cultural context that is modern, male-determined sexism. That derivation means that it is inappropriate. Likewise, sequences of images may be different in different cultures. They may form narratives as a story, but they may also be components of memory devices (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies, 2015). It depends on cultural contexts.

The seers are important, but Janik sometimes forgets that we should not ignore the cultural contexts of the producers. She refers properly to the “agency of seeing,” but in reality, producers and their audience have agency, as do the seers long after the benefit of the producers’ commentary. Sometimes their view of the art makes it seem as if the art itself has agency, but that is a major mistake. Only sentient beings have agency, but producers represented humans and animals in the art to have agency toward each other—that is what makes a scene (Iain Davidson, Chapter 1 in Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art, edited by Iain Davidson and April Nowell, 2021). Appropriate analysis in both modern and archaeological art requires attention to the attitudes of producers and seers as well as to the subjects (what is represented) and objects (the finished art) of their attention. And in some instances, it becomes necessary to consider the physical context of the work in terms of its scale and location at the time of production—something that often requires seeing the originals in context and not on Wikipedia.

And so it goes. This is a book full of good ideas along with analyses that often step outside the mainstream. That is good, but it needs some reference to classic texts that would support elements of Janik's arguments. Additionally, there are numerous and irritating instances of sloppy scholarship, some of which the copy editor should have flagged and others that the author should have checked. For example, on page 50, Janik refers to Winckelmann [1717–1768] following an idea by Hegel [1770–1831]. Such carelessness contributes to making The Archaeology of Seeing a difficult read, despite the interesting ideas it introduces.