Contributors to the conference held at the Warburg Institute in June 2005 were asked to consider the question: how, if at all, can we investigate the iconographic themes of cultures that have left us few or no textual records? Some have responded directly while others have expanded the terms of debate but we hope that all the essays included in this book will be of interest to art historians, archaeologists and anthropologists who are faced with the problem of interpreting visual artefacts that have become divorced from the cultural contexts in which they once had meaning.