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I got a sentence from the introduction of Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives written by Rosemary A Joyce. I don't know how to analyze the structure of this long sentence.

Archaeologists look at images like these (and, where they are available, texts) as another kind of material object shaped by skilled hands driven by the ideas of people who were interested in persuading others to accept their points of view.

Here are some sub-questions. You may know what I confused by the sub-questions.

  1. What does "like" mean? How to use "like"?
  2. What does "these" after "like" point to?
  3. What does the sub-sentence starting with "driven" decorate for?

Here is the whole paragraph.

So Paleolithic figurines are treated not simply as images of ideal or real people, animals, and their interactions. Archaeologists look at images like these (and, where they are available, texts) as another kind of material object shaped by skilled hands driven by the ideas of people who were interested in persuading others to accept their points of view. Archaeologists make unique contributions to gender studies that are important both for our ability to imagine other times, and to understand how the way things are today can come to seem natural and inevitable.

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    The previous sentence mentions Palaeolithic figurines, so presumably 'images like these' are 'images such as these figurines'.
    – Kate Bunting
    Feb 27 at 16:01
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    Archaeologists consider images such as the aforementioned Palaeolithic figurines to be... Where semantically, driven means motivated [by], but imho syntactically / stylistically it's clumsily written - we wouldn't normally say hands are "driven" by the ideas of "people" other than the actual person whose hands they are! And those are literal hands - it's not a figurative usage like farm hands = people who work on a farm.
    – FumbleFingers
    Feb 27 at 16:10

1 Answer 1

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"like these" is a reduced relative clause describing the images. You could expand it to "images that are like these". The word "these" refers to the "palaeolithic figurines". And the meaning is "palaeolithic figurines and images that are similar to palaeolithic figurines".

The long phrase "driven ...points of view" describes the hands (the that shaped the "material objects". Alternately you could read it as parallel to the phrase "shaped by..." and describing the objects.

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