For a recent issue of 21 Inquiries, Alex Potts discusses _Transfixed by Prehistory: by Maria Stavrinaki. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“This important study throws new light on the nineteenth-century European ‘discovery’ of prehistory and the modern re-imaginings of time associated with such opening out to a deep past extend­ing beyond the reach of established narratives of the history of the world and humankind. The phenomenon, Stavrinaki argues, had significant implications for subsequent radical questioning of humanist and historicist mappings of the past as a continuous, largely progressive linear development. Her study’s perspective is thus very much in tune with the contemporary preoccupation with the nonhuman and with a postmodern/poststructuralist disso­lution of inherited notions of historical time. In contrast with much present day cultural and art theoretical speculation in such issues in cultural and modern art studies, however, her analysis grows out of a finely researched history of early European encounters with and scientific interpretation of natural formations and residues of human life originating from well before any previously imaginable past.”