Severin Fowles presented at the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Seminar on New York and American Material Culture on Wednesday, November 7, at 6 pm. His talk was entitled “Iconohistories of the American West.”

Europeans of the sixteenth century brought much more than the guns, germs, and steel that stand at the heart of our dominant histories of the American West. The colonists also introduced a swirl of new images organized around logics that were foreign to indigenous communities and often strongly dissonant with their own understandings of what an image is and how images work. In this talk, Fowles draws upon a decade-long archaeological survey of the rock art of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument to map out the major transformations in image production in northern New Mexico over the past 5,000 years.

Severin Fowles is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, specializing in the landscapes, material culture, and social histories of the American Southwest from pre-colonial to modern times. He is the author of An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion (SAR Press, 2013) and a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2017).