Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (1995)

"The Simplest explanation for contemporary artists' current attraction to ancient images, artifacts, and sites is nostalgia--not only for those periods we now imagine offered a social life simpler and more meaningful than our own, but also for any time when what people made (art) had a secure place in their daily lives. When I cross a moor on which no tree, habitation, or person is visible, and come upon a ring of ragged stones, a single rough-hewn pillar, a line curving away over a hill, a gently rounded mound or cairn of stones. I know this is human-made. I think neither of a boundless nature nor of gods or goddesses, but of the people who made these places. Art itself might be partially defined as an expression of that moment of tension when human intervention in, or collaboration with, nature is recognized. It is sufficiently compelling not to be passed by as part of "amorphous nature." One stops and asks oneself: Who made this? When? Why? What does it have to do with me? One of art's function is to recall that which is absent--whether it is history, or the unconscious, or form, or social justice." (p. 4)