PETYA ANDREEVA | Vassar College (original) (raw)

Papers by PETYA ANDREEVA

UNESCO Silk Road Papers, 2024

Arts, 2023

Dear Colleagues, Following the recent environmental turn in the humanities, an increasing corpus... more Dear Colleagues,

Following the recent environmental turn in the humanities, an increasing corpus of art historical scholarship is responding to the need for post-humanist frameworks in studying the arts of ancient societies. Such works place non-human agents such as fauna in the limelight of their inquiries and, in so doing, shift their focus away from the human practitioner. This line of inquiry is especially pertinent to the study of early China (namely, its northern periphery) and the Iron Age Eurasian Steppe, inhabited mainly by pastoral nomads. Despite having distinctly different preferences for materials and modes of making, both China and the Steppe exhibit a shared aesthetic penchant for zoomorphism. Indeed, animal-inspired bodies define the art and design of these cultural spheres in ways that one would not observe elsewhere in the ancient world. This Special Issue seeks to uncover the different strategies behind the construction and circulation of animal imagery and objects in ancient Central Eurasia (700 BCE–400 CE). Authors may also engage with the usage of products and materials derived from animals, the entanglement of human makers and their biota, animals as cultural capital and tokens of clout, and, more broadly, the role of animals in one’s creative process. The goal of this issue is twofold. It ventures to find new perspectives on ancient cultural spheres that have, for too long, remained on the peripheries of the art historical canon, and whose epistemological potential has not been fully explored. This Special Issue also aims to examine the visual parameters of the unique interactions between pastoralists and the animal kingdom, in light of the former’s great dependency on the latter. Many of the papers study the visual and material manifestations of one’s symbiotic or antagonistic relationship with fauna. While primarily focused on nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples, this Special Issue also considers zoomorphism across north China and elsewhere in Central Eurasia and explores the convergent, fluid notions of zoomorphism across these interconnected cultural zones. Contributions that transcend disciplinary boundaries are most welcome.

Dr. Petya Andreeva
Guest Editor

Early China, 2022

The Iron-Age Eurasian nomads created and circulated elaborate metalworks embellished with images ... more The Iron-Age Eurasian nomads created and circulated elaborate metalworks
embellished with images of entwined, abbreviated, or contorted
zoomorphic anatomies. This approach to zoomorphism has entered
scholarly discourse under the blanket name “animal style,” a term
often used to describe a vast corpus of zoomorphic images associated
with the arts of steppe pastoralists. Numerous Warring States burials
across the Ordos Loop indicate the transmission and adaptation of
steppe-inspired zoomorphism into the funerary cultures of China’s
northern zone (beifang diqu 北方地區) and the Eastern Steppe more
broadly. In the Han dynasty, animal-style images seem to have been
transmitted even more widely, reaching China’s southern periphery at
the Kingdom of Nanyue 南越 and Lelang 樂浪 in the northern Korean
peninsula. The Xianbei hegemony in the post-Han period marked a
new trajectory for these designs, which reached Kofun Japan in the
fifth century. Thus, the original trans-steppe visual formula underwent
significant regional and local translations on a material and conceptual
level to fit already established Chinese design strategies, techniques,
and conceptions of animality. In this essay, I explore the regional alterations
applied to the “supra” animal-style visuality in the Chinese
northern periphery and other regions of Chinese political influence in
North and Central Asia. In so doing, I seek to understand the swift
entry of nomadic visual tropes, namely a specific “pars-pro-toto”
device, into the visual vocabulary of early Chinese craftsmen from the
Eastern Zhou to the Northern dynasties.

Archaeological Research in Asia, 2018

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2021

Ancient tombs and hoards across the Eurasian steppe call for a thorough revision of art-historica... more Ancient tombs and hoards across the Eurasian steppe call for a thorough revision of art-historical categories associated with pastoral societies from Mongolia to Crimea. This study focuses on one such category. "Animal style" is an umbrella term traditionally used to categorise portable precious metalwork ornamented with dynamic scenes of vigorous animal fights and entwined zoomorphic designs. With its emphasis on irregular animal anatomies and deeply rooted in a "pars-pro-toto" mode of expression, steppe imagery of fantastic fauna presents a useful case study in broader investigations of composites in the ancient world and their diffusion across cultural spheres. This study views beasts through a binary lens, the structured monsters of Greco-Roman thinkers and the organic composites of nomadic steppe artisans. In the Western canon, "composites" existed within a politically-manufactured framework of governable "otherness", in which fantastic fauna conveys a certain tension with the exotic, unknown and uncontrollable East. Meanwhile, in the visual rhetoric of steppe artisans, monsters represented a tension with the (cyclical) shifts occurring in one's biota rather than the tumultuous events in one's constructed environment. This paper explores how the contrasting steppe pastoralist and sedentary imperial world-views came to define the various functions and meanings of "composites" in Eurasian Antiquity.

Fashion Theory, 2021

Non-sedentary cultures have existed on the scholarly fringes and historiographical outskirts of t... more Non-sedentary cultures have existed on the scholarly fringes and historiographical outskirts of the art-historical canon: there they remain to this day, buried between dated opposites like "east" and "west," "high" and "minor" arts, torn by interdisciplinary tensions in art history, archaeology and ethnography. Nomadic societies are usually considered in cross-cultural studies only insofar as they can act as sufficiently expedient intermediaries linking settled empires in the designated "East" and "West," hence the recent fascination with the Pontic Scythians who bordered, traded and fought with ancient Greece, or the Xiongnu whose nomadic confederation became a geopolitical threat to early imperial China. Yet, early pastoral nomads bordering China and Greece left behind a rich corpus of gold adornment which points to an elaborate system of image-making and highly conceptual designs rooted in zoomorphism. The following article focuses on the strategies of Fashion Theory

Journal of Oriental Art History, Korea vol. 12 (2021), 191-218 東洋美術史學第 12 號東洋美術史學會, 2021

This paper presents a brief commentary on the methodological tension between hoards, museums and ... more This paper presents a brief commentary on the methodological tension between hoards, museums and burials/ritual sites, associated with pastoral nomadic communities who once flourished along the vast Eurasian steppe, from the Mongolian-Manchurian grassland all the way to the Pannonian basin in East Europe. Nomadic art and material culture have continuously lived at the fringes of art-historical and archaeological inquiries, and their systematic theoretical exploration has been further deterred by the current “top-down” approach to analyzing the steppe archaeological and visual record. Firstly, I problematize the discrepancy between museum acquisitions of (what is labelled as) nomadic art acquired from the antiquities market and what is subsequently categorized as a “hoard” or “treasure”. I observe that certain unrelated sets of objects only “became” hoards after they reached museums and private collections, and so long as their stylistic characteristics fit a pre-established notion of what steppe nomads could and could not have produced. Secondly, the following discourse prompts an investigation into the vital distinction between curatorial labels, authenticated ritual contexts (e.g. burials or votive deposits) and wealth deposits (known as “hoards”, “caches” or “treasure troves”) in non-sedentary Eurasian societies, which are particularly vulnerable to ambiguous labels. The study thus brings up previously overlooked discrepancies, whose recognition and targeted study could bolster not only research practices but also teaching pre-modern Eurasia in higher education.

Orientations, 2020

A pars-pro-toto mode of expression, evident in various zoomorphic junctures, dominates the visual... more A pars-pro-toto mode of expression, evident in various zoomorphic junctures, dominates the visual record of the early Eurasian nomads. What was previously labeled as "animal style" is in fact a rather complex visual language rooted in a number of sophisticated tropes, with "visual synecdoche", inversion, and abbreviation emerging as the primary tropes. In this study, I delve into the vast nomadic art collection of the Penn Museum and observe how the aforementioned visual devices could be helpful in strengthening curatorial practices and art-historical analysis of early steppe art.

Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2018

Elite tombs associated with Iron-Age non-sedentary communities are dispersed across an expansive ... more Elite tombs associated with Iron-Age non-sedentary communities are dispersed across an expansive geographic domain stretching from the Mongolian-Manchurian grassland to the Pontic Steppes. The interior décor of one’s final resting place exhibits a shared visual formula rooted in the repeated, strategic placement of portable luxury items: headdresses and jewelry with composite beasts in hierarchical arrangements decorate the human remains, whereas exuberant textiles envelop the walls, coffin covers and other interior surfaces. Animal-style portable art displays an emphasis on the concept of visual transmogrification as one fantastic beast transforms and terminates into another. Animal images are also represented through a visual synecdoche following the "pars-pro-toto" device: full-bodied animals are replaced by a single anatomic part or depicted as zoomorphic junctures of several beasts thus resulting in a composite monster. This study views the emphasis on movement and metamorphosis of fantastic animals as a politically-determined phenomenon. The author addresses the authority of two types of intended audiences, a real-life one in attendance during the funeral and a second (imagined) one present in the afterlife. The burial likely involved the attendance of other members of the highest echelons of society. Thus, the dramatic optical transformation within the surface of portable ornaments coupled with the theatrical setting of the tomb’s interior and the frequent incorporation of “exotic” goods from sedentary empires indicate that shaping the sensorial experience and expectations of an elite audience were at the heart of the construction of elite nomadic burials. Displays of portable luxury in a pastoral nomadic structure were thus driven by cosmological negotiations of political clout and concerns about sustained collective memory and legitimacy beyond a leader’s death.

I venture to view and analyze the co-existence and symbiotic relationship of the religious and se... more I venture to view and analyze the co-existence and symbiotic relationship of the religious and secular in the wall paintings of Buddhist cave complexes in the Tarim Basin, notably the rock-cut grottoes of Kizil, Bezeklik, and Toyuk. At present, these murals are housed in the National Museum of Korea, Museum fur Asiatische Kunst in Berlin, The National Museum of Korea, Tokyo National Museum, Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite their disparate modern-day locations, these artworks with common provenance and shared historical trajectory, have a pivotal feature in common: the noticeably blurred boundary between religious and secular images, followed by the synthesis of their stylistic idioms. As newly-developed interest in figure painting and proclivity toward experimentation took over in the Tarim basin, a hotbed for artistic and cultural activity in its own right, the previously-established visual formulas were superseded by a novel artistic mode which favored the coexistence of religious and secular themes and visual tropes in a single artwork. This shift occurred due to significant changes in local aesthetics related to matters of receptivity and audience; as such, it was instrumental to the construction of a new visual language along the Chinese northern periphery in the early medieval period.

Previous studies of petroglyphs in Mongolia have focused on the abundant Bronze Age examples. Rec... more Previous studies of petroglyphs in Mongolia have focused on the abundant Bronze Age examples. Recently, however, in the Khawtsgait site in southern Mongolia, two petroglyphs have come to light presenting a major departure from Bronze Age examples in subject, mode of representation, and parallels with funerary art. One depicts a nomadic camp scene head on, the other presents what seems to be a scene about an altar with a seated figure, possibly female, and standing figures. Relatively close parallels to these figures exist in art found in funerary contexts particularly in Xiongnu sites and the Pazyryk tombs in the Russian Altai. Together with these finds, the new Khawtsgait site provides new evidence of Iron Age material culture and funerary beliefs, along with the continuing links of the Mongolian plateau with the steppe west of the Altai.

Conference Presentations by PETYA ANDREEVA

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2021/webprogrampreliminary/Session7563.html Designated under the umbre... more https://caa.confex.com/caa/2021/webprogrampreliminary/Session7563.html
Designated under the umbrella category of “minor arts”, jewelry has been viewed through the lens of historiographies which favor the monumental architecture and fine arts of sedentary Eurasian empires. Nevertheless, in the ancient world, jewelry was actively worn, exchanged, collected, buried, and as such, it remained a potent (global) signifier of high birth, social mobility, merit, political clout, and religious piety. This panel examines portable jewelry as a culturally-specific yet easily-transmittable form of bodily modification, seamlessly encoded in a broader decorative program – that of one’s body, home, tomb or repository. We will undertake a cross-cultural examination of precious ornaments discovered in cemeteries, residential remains, and hoards across an increasingly global Eurasian network from Early Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. Newly-discovered trade routes brought about a new mode of expression: portable luxury. This panel examines the trajectories and shifting biographies of portable ornament: how does jewelry change its meaning when disarticulated from its original context and placed in a new cultural or physical frame during gift exchange, looting, trade, or depositional practices? Conversely, what do culturally-specific jewelry designs and a resistance to exchange indicate about one's value system and sense of identity? We look at diverse modes and materials, from tangible pieces and sets of jewelry to depictions of such on murals, textiles, and sculpture. Finally, all papers deliver a broader critique which views jewelry as the canon’s “blind spot”, continuously pushed to the margins of scholarly inquiries and trapped in a discursive vacuum between “high art” and “craft”.

Books by PETYA ANDREEVA

Edinburgh University Press, 2024

MDPI Books, 2023

An open-access edited volume on the zoomorphic arts of ancient China and Central Asia / Eurasian ... more An open-access edited volume on the zoomorphic arts of ancient China and Central Asia / Eurasian steppe.
https://www.mdpi.com/books/book/6992