The Bicephalous "Animal Style" in Northern Eurasian Religious Art and Its Western Hemispheric Analogues [and Comments and Reply

Abstract

Zoomorphic motifs, including a great variety of artistic variations on the theme of double-headedness, are a useful criterion in iconographic approaches to the ethnoarcheology of New and Old World cultures. These motifs, which are fostered even today in the animal-centered traditions of hunting peoples and their descendants in northern Eurasia and the Americas, seem to have been introduced into North America, via Beringia, at least 14,000 to 10,000 years ago. Despite some basically conservative features rooted in the dualistic spirit world of the shaman, the highly stylized forms, elusiveness of abstract or metaphorical variants, and chronological discontinuities in known assemblages of such artifacts pose several questions of an interdisciplinary nature. The potentialities of comparative iconography may more dependably be reached through ethnoarchaeological inquiries about simple bipartite animal symbols or pairs of symbols than by hypothesizing upon the visual imagery of this class of zoomorphic art as ...