“The geologist will demonstrate that the plunge, or fall, was once at Lake Ontario, and has worn its way back to its present position; he will ascertain how fast it is wearing now, and so get a basis for determining how long it has been wearing back from Lake Ontario, and finally demonstrate by it that this world is at least fourteen thousand years old… But still there is more. It calls up the indefinite past. When Columbus first sought this continent—when Christ suffered on the cross—when Moses led Israel through the Red Sea—nay, even, when Adam first came from the hand of his Maker; then as now, Niagara was roaring here. The eyes of that species of extinct giant, whose bones fill the mounds of America, have gazed on Niagara as ours do now. Co[n]temporary with the whole race of men, and older than the first man, Niagara is strong, and fresh to-day as ten thousand years ago. The Mammoth and Mastodon now so long dead, that fragments of their monstrous bones, alone testify, that they ever lived, have gazed on Niagara. In that long-long time, never still for a single moment. Never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested.”
Abraham Lincoln, “Niagara Falls,” 1848
“When as children we were given those big collected editions, did our gaze not always fall first on the colored plates of petrified landscapes or the lakes and glaciers of the first Ice Age? … A similar panorama of a scarcely past ur-epoch opens up when we gaze into the Passages scattered in every city. Here dwells the last dinosaur of Europe: the consumer.”
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
“The deeper an artist sinks into the time stream the more it becomes oblivion… Floating in this temporal river are the remnants of art history, yet the ‘present’ cannot support the cultures of Europe, or even the archaic or primitive civilizations; it must instead explore the pre- and post-historic mind; it must go into places where remote futures meet remote pasts.”
Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 1968
1In the autumn of 2021, a brief news story carried by several media outlets including NPR and the New York Times announced that a limestone cave in southern Missouri known as “Picture Cave”—and to the Osage Nation as a sacred site—had been sold at auction to a private buyer for $2.2 million. The sale of the cave (a burial place that holds more than 290 “prehistoric” polychrome glyphs featuring people, animals, birds, and mythical creatures, according to the auction’s website) seems to have passed without widespread public outrage, though the Osage Nation denounced it in a statement and vowed to continue to search out ways to recover access. The “Picture Cave” episode reveals how the concept of “prehistory” continues to shape power, land, and culture in the U.S. today. For the auction’s website, the cave art’s antiquity helped make it rare and valuable, while at the same time its designation as “prehistoric” (though chemical analysis indicates its creation was in fact contemporaneous with the European Middle Ages) helps to place it beyond the reach of history, and thus, perhaps, beyond the legal jurisdiction of the present.
2The event makes visible a dynamic that has long featured in American cultural history: an operation that converts the continent’s deep time into an asset (be it aesthetic or financial). The auctioning of “Picture Cave,” then, is a distilled image of modern temporality: terra nullius reborn as tempus nullius, a time belonging to no one, which can thus be usurped by any who take possession of it. In recent years, a number of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians have pointed out this political function of “prehistory” in colonial and postcolonial contexts, a point to which this introduction will return. Such moments lay bare one aspect of prehistory’s contemporary political urgency. In some sense, the same logic that converts sacred caves into real estate governs the extraction of oil from ancient carbon, the recuperation of fossils as national myth, and the paradoxical “preservation” of Indigenous sites while removing Indigenous presence. In each of these cases, historical processes take on the appearance of natural ones; social and economic relations sediment into the landscape until they seem self-evident.
- 1 The etymology of “contemplation” reaches back to pagan roots: com- + templum, “area for the taking (...)
3The effect arises from the institutions and practices—particularly, for this issue, visual practices—that render ownership, extraction, and erasure into ordinary features of the world. Vision has always been entangled with deep time, whether through the surveyor’s lens, the artist’s brush, the illustrator’s pen, the museum’s dioramas and murals, or the photographer’s aperture. Each mediates the relation between nature and history, translating the distant or the buried into a surface that can be read or contemplated.1 As the American writer and journalist John McPhee noted in the 1981 essay in which he coined the term “deep time,” the geologist James Hutton was often accompanied on his excursions by an artist, whose sketches and watercolors seemed to have helped him envision the almost unimaginable stretches of time called for by his theory (107). Images can structure and sometimes narrativize deep time (often through processes of projection), literally making it legible, or they can convey its sublime unknownability. To apprehend deep time requires a way of seeing as much as a way of thinking.
Fig. 1. Michael Sherwin, Shrum Mound, Columbus OH, Vanishing Points, c. 2011-2019
Archival pigment print, 24x29 in. www.michaelsherwin.com/vanishing-points.
4It is precisely the processes by which deep time in America is forgotten, recalled, and naturalized that Michael Sherwin interrogates in his photographic project Vanishing Points. Shortly after moving to Morgantown, West Virginia, some twenty years ago, Sherwin learned that a local shopping center had been built upon an 800-year-old burial ground and village site associated with the Monongahelan culture. This revelation transformed his understanding of the landscape he inhabited, and the Vanishing Points project represents a years-long reflection that resulted. It documents Indigenous ceremonial sites across the United States—from Ohio’s earthworks to the basalt canyons of the West. At its subtlest, Sherwin’s eye seems attuned to the ways that “prehistory” is alternately hiding in plain sight, or made to be visible (though typically in sanitized form). The images’ stillness is in some sense deceptive: they are riven with relations of power, marked by the contest over the visible and invisible.
- 2 Historicization requires contextualization in time in order to explain change. From one perspective (...)
5This making-visible and making-invisible seems, to me, near the heart of the project. The idea of a “vanishing point” carries a double meaning. In the creation of perspective, it is an illusory meeting point of sightlines that creates depth, while in historical terms it marks the spot where memory or narrative might yield to oblivion. As Rémi Labrusse argued in his keynote address at the 2022 conference at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art that preceded this journal issue, it was precisely around this pivot—between the desire to fill in deep time with narrative (typically based on a projection of contemporary political or aesthetic concerns), making the science of prehistory the crowning moment of the nineteenth-century dream to historicize everything, and prehistory as something fundamentally mute, non-narrativizable, and vertiginous—that engagement with prehistory has turned.2
6While focused on American literature, a prior issue of Transatlantica raised many of the same questions about deep time and meaning. “Have we reached the expiry date of narrative itself,” asked its editor, Cécile Roudeau, “when both the scale of the present and the scale of geological time are so vast that they defy all attempts to accommodate them into a story?” In fact, she argues, the depth of time did not simply impede the effort to create a national story or a continental nation-empire, but was instead, “part of its complex unfolding and legitimization.” It both, “challenged and reinforced nation and narration, obliging them both to face problems of continuity or discontinuity, causality, structure and scale.” Transposing this discussion onto Sherwin’s pictures, we might ask whether they too expose a tension between prehistory as something seemingly eloquent and made (often deceptively) legible, and prehistory as a disturbingly mute presence, resistant to historicization and emplotment. Of the perspective lines that lead to a vanishing point, Sherwin writes that they are, “meant to create depth on an otherwise flat surface. However, they never really disappear. The further you follow them the deeper it takes you into the scene” (www.michaelsherwin.com/vanishing-points). One might say something similar about the lure of prehistory—the further one pursues it, strives to turn it into history, the more the answers recede. The “vanishing point” becomes an allegory for prehistory itself: the point where the perspective necessary to write histories falters, without, however, abolishing our desire for it. Sherwin’s project demonstrates that the prehistoric is not simply a matter of the remote or the extinct, but of a making-visible and a making-invisible, or a marking of space as natural or historical that disguises the historical in the natural and the natural in the historical. His pictures seem to reveal the trouble that continuously haunts this boundary marking. In this sense, “prehistory” becomes a kind of mirror in which processes of social reproduction, colonial politics, and the natural world refract into one another.
7This gaze turned back toward distant origins (and implicitly forward to dimly-perceived futures) has structured American self-understanding from the seventeenth century to the present. Prehistory, in this sense, is not only a disciplinary field but a recurrent symptom of modernity’s need to imagine its own relation to nature, to non-modern others, and to its own limits. The precise modifications of this symptom were highly variable (its specific visual motifs, media, genres, and so on). But for a society in the midst of rapid epistemological, social, and cultural change—in which, as Peter Fritzsche has argued, the past, present and future no longer formed a smooth continuum—the need to anchor oneself in history was matched by the nagging problem of that effort’s limits (5-7). “Prehistory” helped name, visualize, and concretize that limit. Forms of domination—economic, racial, ecological—could be said to produce their own prehistories (or myths of what lies outside history). Yet the images associated with them—be they remnants from the distant past such as fossils, ruins, bones, and broken tools, or the modern images produced to visualize prehistory—offer another kind of knowledge: a dialectical reminder of how what appears to stand outside history returns within it as its most charged remainder.
8The problem of prehistory tends to appear wherever modern observers confront a world that appears older than their categories of understanding can comprehend. Abraham Lincoln, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Smithson, whose words open this dossier, each confronted that threshold, though from very different vantage points. If Lincoln, writing at the hinge of what historian Eric Hobsbawm called the “Age of Revolutions” (1789-1848) and the “Age of Capital” (1848-1875) perhaps sought to ground the new American republic in geological permanence, Benjamin and Smithson, writing firmly within the more pessimistic “Age of Extremes” (1914-1991), witnessed the petrification of modernity itself. Across this interval, however, the dialectical reversibility of nature and history persisted, each the other’s residue and reflection.
- 3 Lincoln’s text, itself like a fossil of some intermediate evolutionary step, is a fascinating mix o (...)
- 4 “Mound Builders” is a catchall term, referring not to a specific people or archaeological culture b (...)
- 5 Miller has shown that a similar political dynamic was at play in her writing on the painter Thomas (...)
9Lincoln’s “Niagara” diary fragment belongs to a moment when the geological sublime was still relatively young, its moral and imaginative contours newly available to the American mind. In marvelling at Niagara’s “indefinite past,” the way that it “roared here” since “Adam first came from the hand of his Maker,” Lincoln transposed biblical time into the scale of geology.3 Yet, more than a moral parable of republican solidity, the most striking aspect of Lincoln’s reflection is perhaps his invocation of the “extinct giants,” whose bones filled the mounds of the continent. As art historian Angela Miller has shown, in Antebellum America the so-called Mound Builders could symbolize both national legitimacy and a warning against imperial hubris.4 While their discovery fueled white nationalist fantasies of inheriting the land from a vanished “civilized race” overcome by the exogenous invasions of “barbarous” tribes, in contradicting the myth of America as a virgin land, they also provoked melancholy reflections on the cyclical rise and fall of empires (1994 28-33). Fears that Jacksonian empire-building would lead to decadence and decline were especially resonant among Whigs like Lincoln, preoccupied as they were with moral decay, civic virtue, and the fragility of republics.5 The Mound Builders were thus a paradoxical emblem of both progress and ruin, of the directional irreversibility of progressive history and of the cyclical repetition of nature.
- 6 Susan Buck-Morss explores how this term passed to Benjamin from György Lukács via Theodor Adorno, a (...)
10Nearly a century later, writing in exile in Paris, Walter Benjamin applied this double vision to the cast-iron arcades of the nineteenth century, seeing a petrified dreamworld in which history had hardened into a “second nature.”6 The detritus of nineteenth-century consumer culture had become the paleontological record of capitalism, under which historical development must obey quasi-natural laws of “competition” and, after Darwin’s historicization of nature and the emergence of Social Darwinism, the “survival of the fittest.” Against a bourgeois civilization that seemed increasingly bent on destruction (including its own), Benjamin held out hope for a radical break with the “natural” state of things, arguing that all history would be only a “prehistory” dominated by capital’s quasi-natural laws so long as humanity was subjected to its blind forces (Buck-Morss 64-65). More recently, Eli Friedlander has seen “natural history” and the issue of the natural within the human as central to understanding Benjamin’s thought as a whole (2-3).
- 7 Buck-Morss argues that the speech showed the influence of his talks with Benjamin in 1929 when they (...)
11This rich dialectical opposition of nature and history in Benjamin’s Arcades Project both influenced and drew from Theodor Adorno’s 1932 speech “The Idea of Natural History.”7 Arguing against Martin Heidegger’s attempt to solve the problem of historicist relativism by synthesizing or collapsing nature and history, Adorno posited nature and history as dialectically opposed concepts that could be deployed to critical ends against one another. In the speech, he sought to comprehend objects as natural where they appear most historical, and conversely as historical where they appear most natural (260). Each term points beyond itself, bearing within it the trace of its other. Naturgeschichte names not a continuity but a crisis—a moment when freedom, established by a creative internalization or mimicry of nature, becomes alienated and reified “second nature,” but also when life might return to this “petrified” and estranged pseudo-nature, allowing new creativity.
- 8 A number of scholars, at least since Buck-Morss’ Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009), have b (...)
12I want to suggest that, applied to the American context, this concept provides a key to understanding the essays in this dossier collectively.8 Prehistory, viewed through this lens, is not merely the past prior to writing. Instead, it is simultaneously the image of history stripped of freedom, where domination appears as a natural fact, and a buried memory of human creativity before the mind became alienated from natural substance. This approach aligns with the larger argument of the present issue: that “prehistory” itself can function both as ideology and as method, both as the name of exclusion and as the tool for uncovering it. Rather than treat it as a stable category, we can approach it as an archive of contested meanings, a record of the shifting boundaries between the natural and the historical.
- 9 Though she emphasizes important differences between them, largely to do with Smithson’s more entrop (...)
13It helps clarify how Lincoln’s, Benjamin’s, and Smithson’s gazes into deep time resonate together. Lincoln’s sublime of endurance, Benjamin’s fossilized commodity, and Smithson’s entropic landscapes all reveal the paradox that civilization’s triumph over nature is also nature’s return within civilization.9 Writing in the 1960s, Smithson’s “abstract geology” of earth projects transposed this intimation into a language of entropy, of matter and mind disintegrating together. For Smithson, the earth and the artist were “in a constant state of erosion,” their “conceptual crystallizations” breaking down into “deposits of gritty reason” (1). Together, these figures outline the temporal and philosophical field in which this issue operates. What binds them is not a shared answer but a shared perplexity: how to think freedom within necessity, how to see not only history through nature but nature through history. In each case, prehistory functions as an allegory of modern experience—an image through which modernity glimpses its own conditions.
14The key to this expanded view of the topic is to see prehistory not only as a past epoch or a myth to be debunked, but primarily as a symptom and a critical resource. Not to collapse nature and history into one another but to keep their tension alive. Within this recognition lies possibility—the recovery of a sense of nature not wholly subsumed by instrumentality. If capital now disorganizes and reorganizes the metabolism of the planet itself, then the distinction between history and nature has lost not its meaning but rather its innocence. To confront that entanglement is to recognize ourselves as living within the prehistory of another order, one that might yet emerge from the ruins of this one.
15In the American context, the distinction between nature and history was never just abstract: it was materially enacted in the colonization of land, the classification of peoples, and the construction of national time. Comparing the mid- to late-nineteenth century development of “prehistory” as a discipline in France and the United States, Oscar Moro Abadía and Eduardo Palacio Pérez have argued that nationalism and colonialism shaped these two traditions differently. Whereas for prehistorians such as Boucher de Perthes, Mortillet, and Cartailhac prehistory was imagined as the earliest chapter of French history, extending national origins back into deep time, American archaeology during the height of westward expansion and Indigenous expulsion saw native peoples as a form of living fossils (Abadía and Palacio Pérez 92-99). Surveying the evolution of the prehistory concept, Stefanos Geroulanos argues that it was inseparable from imperialism, and was not so much an era before writing as a modern way of organizing time that transformed human difference into a temporal categorization of peoples and races. Prehistory, in this light, was less a temporal category than a political technology of time—an instrument that organized humanity, distributing agency unevenly across the globe. What appeared to be a neutral scale of temporal measurement was in fact a hierarchy of being.
16A number of scholars in American studies, archaeology, and anthropology have recently worked to undo this colonial inflection of the prehistory/history divide. Maxine Oland, Siobhan Hart, and Liam Frink note that it emerged from the colonial encounter itself as a means of naturalizing dispossession by projecting Indigenous presence into an immemorial, ahistorical past (1-3). In the interest of recovering longer Indigenous histories, they favor adopting a language of “transition,” continuity, and change rather than “prehistoric” and “historic,” or “precolonial” and “colonial” (3). Building on this critique, Gesa Mackenthun and Christen Mucher argue that “prehistory” remains a central ideological technology of Western modernity: a narrative form that universalizes European temporal frameworks while displacing Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty (3-4). Historian and archaeologist Akinwumi Ogundiran has likewise pointed out that in colonized areas, “the shadowy tail of prehistory indeed tends to be very long,” making it harder to write deeper and better histories of such places (788-789). In the recent book The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow even flipped the nature vs. history script, arguing that human beings demonstrated more freedom and creativity in making decisions about their collective forms of life in what has been understood as “prehistory” than in times deemed “historical.”
17Certainly, prehistory’s great spans of time meant that it could easily serve as a screen on which to project contemporary desires and anxieties, what Labrusse has referred to as the “semantic” strategy of making sense out of prehistory. As Stefanos Geroulanos and Maria Stavrinaki have argued, prehistory often served as a “machine for creating communal cohesion through an imagined common origin” and served as a “foundation for metaphor, myth, and meaning; a site for projecting fears” (1). From its beginnings, the new American republic sought antiquity without empire—an origin story that could rival Europe’s ruins yet remain unsullied by feudalism or the moral decline associated with imperialism. In Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, the mastodon served as an emblem of this ambition: proof that the New World was as ancient and vigorous as the Old. Paul Semonin has traced how the discovery of these giant bones transformed the mastodon into a totemic symbol of national identity, merging republican optimism, belief in providence, and grounding in a kind of natural antiquity (1-5). Broadly, he shows that natural history was shot through with “myth and metaphor” and was deeply tied to emerging ideas and practices of racial hierarchy (xiii, 236-241). As already mentioned, Angela Miller has shown how the confrontation with Native American mounds, and the elaboration of various myths and theories about those who constructed them, extended these attempts to make sense out of apparently prehistorical remains (Miller 1994).
18Around the mid-nineteenth century, American “prehistory” began slowly to acquire a more solid institutional form. The rise of professional archaeology, geology, and paleontology sanctioned hierarchies with new forms of epistemological authority. James Snead has shown how a complex contest played out between Eastern experts, Western “relic hunters,” and the public over the intellectual and entertainment stakes of encounters with Indigenous antiquities. Alice Kehoe has traced how this earlier ad hoc American archaeology began to professionalize and adopted the term “prehistory” from the work of the Scottish-Canadian Daniel Wilson, who she credits with introducing it into English in the 1850s and presenting all Indigenous history as prehistory in his 1862 work, Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and the New World (xiii).
19The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, epitomized the new epistemological spectacle of prehistory, and the tension between science and entertainment that haunted the concept (Rieppel, 2012 461). As Victoria Cain has argued, the museum’s reconstructions were designed for “virtual witnessing,” bringing spectators as close as possible to a prehistoric world and aligning pedagogy with visceral experience (289-292). Charles R. Knight’s paintings, mounted beside the new fossil displays, helped create that immediacy, both facilitating and taming the imaginations of the public, giving them a scientific image to allay more fantastical ones they might create by viewing the fossil reconstructions unaided (Cain 287). Evidence of such “undisciplined” fantasies of prehistory has been unearthed by Jennifer Greenhill, who has analyzed artist George Beard’s “burlesque” proposal for an underground passage linking the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum underneath Central Park. Complete with massive figures of antediluvian beasts and primitive men with stone tools, the tongue-in-cheek proposal sought to literally “undermine” foundational cultural binaries—both of nature and culture and of high and low culture (77-107). The episode shows that “prehistory” had a critical potential to scramble cultural coordinates as well as order them.
20Up above, in the museum, murals and dioramas of “prehistoric life”—dinosaurs and later “cave men”—framed extinction as both tragedy and triumph, inviting visitors to marvel at the scale of time that modern science and empire had conquered. W. J. T. Mitchell has suggested that the dinosaur became the “totem animal of modernity”: an image through which the modern world contemplated itself (77-85). Lukas Rieppel has shown how the museum’s fossil displays were a symbol of modernity’s own self-image rather than a simple neutral object of scientific inquiry. The exhibitions were theaters of corporate modernity, entangled with the cultural logic of the Gilded Age, whose industrial magnates derived their wealth and power from the Earth’s depths. The museum’s fossil halls transformed bones into indexical fragments whose physical authenticity grounded the imaginative reconstructions of primordial life by artists such as Charles R. Knight, meant to allow the public to indulge in fantasy. The museum crystallized prehistory’s dual nature: at once epistemological and aesthetic, disciplinary and dreamlike. The halls of evidence were also theaters of enchantment, where the desire to know merged with the desire to see.
21To experience prehistory was to oscillate between detachment and immersion, between the will to mastery and the pleasure of wonder. This tension—between distance and immersion, between explanation and enchantment—runs through the entire history of prehistory in American visual culture. The farther the past receded, the more vividly it could be imagined; the more rigorously it was catalogued, the more powerfully it returned as myth. From Jefferson’s mastodon to Knight’s murals, the same fossils that underpinned scientific certainty also animated the national imagination. The task in this issue is not just to expose the ideological work this vision performed but to examine the visual and material forms through which it operated, attuned to their ambivalences.
22If the gentlemen archaeologists of the Early Republic looked backward for national foundations, the turn-of-the-century artist and intellectual began to look backward for escape. In No Place of Grace (1981), Jackson Lears memorably described the late-nineteenth-century cult of the primitive as an antimodern revolt against industrial rationality—a search for vitality in the imagined energies of prehistory. In painting, literature, and popular spectacle, the deep past ceased to be merely explanatory; it became therapeutic, a reservoir of lost authenticity. The romanticization of prehistory answered modernity’s spiritual fatigue with a vision of unbounded strength. Ross Barrett, for instance, has shown how U.S. corporations such as Standard Oil used such ideas about primitive vitality and masculinity to naturalize mineral extraction and align geological deep time with economic teleology (411-416). By the turn of the century, this craze for prehistoric origins flooded the screens of early cinema. Jutta Teutenberg argues that the “prehistoric human” was not only a product of science but a cultural construction produced through visual media, including film (174-199). Early cinema frequently used the stories of the cave man to emplot concerns about feminism, masculinity, and degeneration. In 1915, in one of the earliest books of film criticism, the poet Vachel Lindsay even figured the modern cinema-goer—often an immigrant in large urban centers with limited literacy—as a caveman watching pictures flickering on the wall (171, 207).
23As many of these examples have already intimated, images of prehistory did not merely illustrate an earlier world; rather, they produced the sense of its distance and its return. Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa Schwartz write that images have not merely illustrated historical knowledge but have been integral to its very production, shaping how publics have come to see and make sense of the past (2-3). This was also true of prehistory, though its images often functioned in different ways than history images, as the essays in this issue demonstrate. From the seventeenth century onward, pictures accompanied—and often animated—speculations about the distant past and about “nature,” and they continued to do so across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as new media, new evidentiary conventions, and new formations of art and popular culture took shape. Images helped scientists concretize the almost unimaginable depth of prehistory, just as they did for the broader public. In museums, illustrated books, and later film, the prehistoric became visible not as a record but as an atmosphere—at once empirical and enchanted.
24In the twentieth century, the prehistoric became a modernist idiom—a repertoire of motifs, forms, materials, and gestures—through which artists grappled with the problem of time and historical consciousness. By this point, confidence in linear historical progress and the ability to situate oneself security in historical time was in a distinct crisis—history as meaningful narrative gave way to a sense of temporal rupture. Even as modern subjects were saturated with representations of the past, they seemed deprived of a living connection to it. Confronting this crisis, modernism turned to imagined origins to negotiate the tension between historical consciousness and the longing for immediacy. In Préhistoire. L’envers du temps, Rémi Labrusse frames this as modern art’s reflection of temporal crisis: prehistory as the reverse side of time. New discoveries of prehistoric parietal art in the Old World exploded onto the American scene in events like the 1937 MoMA exhibition of large-scale facsimiles of prehistoric rock pictures, which, as Elke Seibert has shown, became objects of identification, emulation, and legitimation for American abstract artists (17).
25In Transfixed by Prehistory, Maria Stavrinaki argues that modern art’s dialogue with prehistory was not merely escapist but reflexive. “The abyss opened by the new age attributed to the earth,” she writes, “soon opened up in Western man himself” as people began to “internalize” the vastness of these long natural processes (10). Humanity was drawn closer to the “animality of natural history,” and the discovery of parietal art threw art’s traditional narratives and chronologies into chaos (12). Prehistory, she points out, is distinctly associated with astonishment and wonder—in its strangeness and depth, it “transfixed” moderns, and the shock it rendered to their ordering of time and knowledge explains modern art’s deep engagement with it (15). While prehistory was subjected to repeated attempts at historicization, Stavrinaki argues that its mute and opaque depths were never wholly eradicable, which explains its alignment with the “negative or critical side of modernity” and its utopian potential (16). Following this tendency up to the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, art historian Larisa Dryansky has explored how, in a period of accelerating technological change and automation, American artists identified with prehistory because of its primordial association with technical creativity, as a time when tool-making was embodied and “human” instead of incomprehensible and alien (174).
26The concept’s afterlife in art and visual culture has thus become a means of excavating the deep contradictions of modernity itself. This more or less latent critical potential within the “prehistory” idea is why, while it has often served as an ideological handmaiden of colonialism, it nonetheless expresses something important. Rather than jettison it entirely, as some of the scholars at the beginning of this section seem to suggest, thereby turning all of nature into history, this dossier seeks to explore how the term mobilizes a tension between history and nature, freedom and determination, the contingent and the unchanging. Pictures are important fragments with which to “unearth” or “excavate” the history of this tension. Images do not merely illustrate the tension between nature and history; they enact it, suspending viewers between the will to know and the thrill of being “lost” in time.
27The essays gathered in this issue of Transatlantica approach “prehistory” as a problem that traverses centuries of American visual and intellectual culture, standing for what resists chronology and persists beneath the surface of historical progress. Each, in different ways, examines how images, objects, and narratives have been made to carry the weight of the prehistoric—how they mediate between nature and history, knowledge and desire, domination and critique. Their objects vary—from early engravings and panoramic spectacles to modern sculpture, animation, pulp fiction, and conceptual art—but each confronts a similar question: how do representations of the remote past articulate modernity’s desires and contradictions? Read together, they trace a history of how images and art mediated and concretized tension around nature, time, culture, determination, and freedom.
28Thomas Balfe’s article opens the dossier with an inquiry into how early modern printmaking first configured the New World as a space of temporal displacement. Focusing on two engravings from de Bry’s illustrated travel books of 1591 and 1627, Balfe shows how scenes of Indigenous hunting and agriculture were designed to signify not simply difference but temporal otherness—linking Native American life to what Europeans imagined as the “time of nature” or the era before civilization. His analysis reveals how de Bry intertwined ethnographic observation and mythic archetypes of the wild man or the Golden Age to produce overlapping “timelines” that collapsed the distance between the European self and its imagined other. The engravings thus operated as colonial technologies of deep time, projecting the Americas as both archaic and allegorical, a surface upon which Western natural history could inscribe itself. The images’ overlapping motifs create a pictorial palimpsest in which “nature” and “civilization” coexist uneasily, each defining the other through temporal displacement. In this sense, de Bry’s project inaugurates the logic that later nineteenth-century archaeologists and artists would systematize: the use of visual form to assign peoples to different moments on a single universal timeline.
29From this early modern threshold, we turn to the mid-nineteenth century, still before the formation of prehistory as a disciplinary field but when the age of the earth was becoming more widely appreciated, and questions around the antiquity of Indigenous Americans continued to be urgent. Lucie Grandjean analyzes the popular spectacles through which archaeology entered nineteenth-century public consciousness. Commissioned by the antiquarian Wilson Montroville Dickeson and painted by John J. Egan after Dickeson’s excavations in the Mississippi Valley, the Panorama of the Monuments of North America unrolled a “kaleidoscopic” vision of deep time: ancient mounds, contemporary Indigenous portraits, and geological vistas succeeding one another without linear order. Grandjean interprets this extraordinary composition as an experiment in visual historiography, blending ethnology, archaeology, and landscape painting to convey a stratified rather than continuous sense of time. In Dickeson’s spectacle, the Mississippi Valley becomes both excavation site and screen—its shifting imagery registering the nineteenth century’s attempt to reconcile empirical science with the fantasy of a vanished civilization. Working with the notion of “extraction” to figure both Dickeson’s archaeological practice and the panorama’s representational strategy, Grandjean argues that Egan “extracts” fragments of time and space from the Mississippi landscape to recombine them into a phantasmagoria that combined prehistory, history, and ethnography, the real and imagined, the glorious and the humorous.
30Julia Sienkewicz’s article stays in the mid-nineteenth century and continues the thematic focus on efforts to picture Indigenous time, but widens our geographical focus outward, tracing the prehistoric imagination of America to mid-nineteenth-century Rome, where art, ethnography, and politics converged under the sign of universal history. Her essay reconstructs a lecture delivered in 1859 by Fr. Antonio Bresciani, SJ at the Pontifical Archaeological Academy on the occasion of the installation of Ferdinand Pettrich’s Indian Museum in the Lateran Palace. Pettrich’s sculptures, portraying leaders of sovereign nations from the Mississippi Valley, were read by Bresciani as evidence of humanity’s earliest migrations. Sienkewicz situates this interpretive gesture within the transatlantic politics of the Risorgimento, as Pius IX’s Vatican sought to affirm the universality of the Church’s temporal vision against the secular nationalism threatening its rule. The episode reveals how the languages of archaeology and salvation history could merge to produce a theology of continuity, one in which the American “primitive” was folded into a sacred genealogy stretching back to Adam. Given the way in which the deeply conservative church felt threatened by secularism and liberalism, there was an opportunity for identification with the equally threatened Indigenous groups represented by Pettrich. Indeed, by tracing Indigenous peoples back to immigrations from Asia Minor, Bresciani attempted to create a literal and direct genealogy to Rome via the Troy of Aeneas. In light of the apparent dubiousness of such a theory, Pettrich’s portraits played a crucial role by serving as “eyewitness” evidence of physiognomic traces.
31Moving into the twentieth century, Franck Joubin’s article explores how the French-born sculptor Gaston Lachaise (1882–1935) mobilized prehistoric imagery to articulate a distinctly American sense of rebirth and vitality. He begins by noting that Lachaise’s 1928 statement claiming lineage from “the first artist who awakened to beauty” marks a decisive shift in the sculptor’s self-mythology. At that moment, Lachaise identified with a primordial maker who painted the walls of caves and sculpted “his woman” from the earth. In his case, this identification with prehistory, which was common among avant-garde artists, had a particular twist, since he also saw America as “virgin soil” capable of nurturing a new cult of fertility. At the same time, Joubin emphasizes the ambivalence of this gesture. By the time of his 1935 MoMA retrospective, Lachaise publicly disavowed explicit prehistoric references, attempting to assimilate his work to modernist classicism. Yet, as Joubin notes, this denial is strange, since the logic of prehistoric regeneration continued to structure his aesthetics. His “cult of the woman” remained a transatlantic myth of new beginnings, grounded in the fantasy of the New World as both archaic and fertile.
- 10 This is a neat demonstration of the second strategy which Rémi Labrusse argues characterizes effort (...)
32The next two essays turn our gaze from artistic modernism and studio practice to state propaganda and mass culture. Breanne Robertson’s essay examines how the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs mobilized cultural heritage during the Second World War to promote hemispheric unity, focusing on Walt Disney Studios’ 1943 animated short The Grain that Built a Hemisphere. The film presents maize as a shared symbol rooted in Mesoamerican prehistory, contrasting the intellectual Maya—elevated as rational, proto-democratic scientists—with the militaristic and despotic Aztecs, in order to make an argument about Allied and Axis values and dispositions. Robertson shows how animation, archaeology, and propaganda converged to construct a narrative of democratic continuity that masked the asymmetries of U.S. power. Prehistory here becomes a diplomatic language, translating scientific authority and popular aesthetics into geopolitical persuasion. The rich motion and color of the Disney animation style helped produce affect and narrative, visually condensing the development of a food crop that in reality took place over an unimaginably long time, rather than the short duration that the binary opposition between Mayan science and Aztec despotism suggested.10
33Ryan Linkof’s article traces how Robert E. Howard’s Conan of 1930s pulp fiction and its later visualization by Frank Frazetta on cheap paperback covers turned evolutionary speculation into a popular myth of masculine survival. The argument demonstrates how the prehistoric imagination merged with mass culture, carrying with it the sediment of nineteenth-century evolutionism and a melange of scientific or pseudo-scientific theories. Conan’s hypertrophic body—imagined as if chiseled by natural selection—embodied a vision of prehistory as a test of strength and purity, translating Darwinian struggle into heroic form. The “barbarian” is not only fantasy but also an anthropological figure through which modernity rehearses its anxieties about degeneration, gender, and race. Linkof’s analysis reveals how visual media—the pulp illustration, the paperback cover—inscribe the prehistoric as both spectacle and ideology. Frazetta’s gleaming musculature literalizes the fusion of art and nature, industry and instinct, echoing the overarching theme of nature’s (often distorted) return within civilization.
34The dossier closes with Mylène Palluel’s article on Robert Morris’ essay “Aligned with Nazca” (1975), which situates the prehistoric imagination within the intellectual climate of the 1960s and 1970s. Reading Robert Morris’s essay alongside the theories of George Kubler and Fernand Braudel, Palluel interprets the artist’s engagement with the Peruvian geoglyphs as a meditation on the longue durée of form and landscape. Morris’s comparative method—linking pre-Columbian traces with contemporary environmental art—translates longue durée history into aesthetic practice. In contrast to Western art’s event and object-based chronology, these forms materialize a new relation to duration and environment. In Palluel’s analysis, the prehistoric becomes a framework for thinking across temporal and geographic scales, an art-historical experiment in connecting morphology, anthropology, and ecology. She shows that the essay is a model for thinking history beyond event and process, another form, perhaps, of recalling nature from within modernity’s accelerated and punctuated temporality.
35Taken together, these studies reveal how “prehistory” has served less as a fixed epoch than as a mobile category through which American culture has negotiated its entanglement in history and nature. From de Bry’s engravings to Morris’s conceptual cartographies, the prehistoric continually reappears not as a stable origin but as a site of tension, where modernity confronts the persistence of what it seeks to transcend. To trace this category across four centuries is therefore not only to expose the ideological work of origin myths—their complicity with empire, race, and capital—but also to recognize the critical possibilities they conceal. These images and objects were frequently ambivalent, possessing the power both to educate and entertain, explain and seduce, induce fantasy and inspire new visions of the future. In recovering these ambivalences, this issue invites readers to see “prehistory” as a mirror in which the modern world glimpses both its own formation and its still-unfinished transformation.