This study explores how and why people have made and modified images and other cultural material from pre-history into the 21st century. By juxtaposing objects and places usually considered in isolation, provocative questions are raised about our understandings of cross-cultural differences and the value of representational objects. The book examines themes such as violence, punishment, memory and intentionality, and breaks new ground by including contributions from archaeologists, curators, and museum conservators as well as from historians of art, literature and religious studies.

Contents: Introduction: breaking images, Stacy Boldrick; Making and breaking images and meaning in Byzantium and early Islam, Leslie Brubaker; Iconoclasm in European prehistory? Breaking objects and landscapes, Henry Chapman and Benjamin Gearey; The Buddha head at Kofukuji Temple ( Nara, Japan), Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders; Marked faces, displaced bodies: monument breakage and reuse among the classic-period Maya, Megan E. O'Neil; Creative iconoclasms in Renaissance Italy, Anna M. Kim; Allegorical tomb of Lord Somers: British identity built on ruins?, Lauren Dudley; Ste Geneviève, iconoclasm and the transformation of signs in Revolutionary Paris, Richard Clay; Iconoclasm and the Enlightenment museum, James Simpson; Iconoclasm in the 20th century: machines, mass destruction and two World Wars, James Noyes; The Taliban, Bamiyan, and revisionist iconoclasm, Jamal J. Elias; The cruel practice of art, Simon Baker; Iconoclasm as conservation, concealment and subversion, Simon Cane and Jonathan Ashley-Smith; Conclusions: saving images (the fate of bones), Stacy Boldrick and Tabitha Barber; Bibliography; Index.