Apart from its aesthetic evaluation, the study of any art object or class of objects should be carried out following three distinct though interrelated lines of analysis. The first is iconographic, i.e. at the same time morphological, technological, and historical, and concerns the nature of the objects per se, their formal characters, the technique of production, their distribution in space and time, and their stylistic affinities to similar productions elsewhere. The second is iconological, and has to do with the meaning of the representation, the nature of the beings it purports to portray, and the underlying system of conceptions and beliefs in which it is integrated—the world of ideas and symbols in a given culture. These first two aspects of the analysis are common also to archaeological research. The third approach, on the other hand, is more distinctly anthropological, as it deals with the impact of those ideas and of their concrete symbols on the everyday life of the society concerned and with their influence on the ritual and social behaviour and thought of individual men and women. Only a combination of these three approaches can give us a true picture of the phenomenon we are called upon to investigate.