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Picture Worlds
This abundantly illustrated volume is the first to explore the painted pottery of the ancient Greek, Moche, and Maya cultures side by side. Satyrs and sphinxes, violent legumes, and a dancing maize deity figure in the stories painted on the pottery produced by the ancient Greek, Moche, and Maya cultures, respectively. Picture Worlds is the first book to examine the elaborately decorated terracotta vessels of these three distinct civilizations. Although the cultures were separated by space and time, they all employed pottery as a way to tell stories, explain the world, and illustrate core myths and beliefs. Each of these painted pots is a picture world. But why did these communities reach for...
The Jaguar Within
An important new way of viewing the prehistoric art of the Americas, The Jaguar Within demonstrates that understanding a work of art’s connection with shamanic trance can lead to an appreciation of it as an extremely creative solution to the inherent challenge of giving material form to nonmaterial realities and states of being. Shamanism—the practice of entering a trance state to experience visions of a reality beyond the ordinary and to gain esoteric knowledge—has been an important part of life for indigenous societies throughout the Americas from prehistoric times until the present. Much has been written about shamanism in both scholarly and popular literature, but few authors have ...
The Gifted Passage
In this thought-provoking book, preeminent scholar Stephen Houston turns his attention to the crucial role of young males in Classic Maya society, drawing on evidence from art, writing, and material culture. The Gifted Passage establishes that adolescent men in Maya art were the subjects and makers of hieroglyphics, painted ceramics, and murals, in works that helped to shape and reflect masculinity in Maya civilization. The political volatility of the Classic Maya period gave male adolescents valuable status as potential heirs, and many of the most precious surviving ceramics likely celebrated their coming-of-age rituals. The ardent hope was that youths would grow into effective kings and noblemen, capable of leadership in battle and service in royal courts. Aiming to shift mainstream conceptions of the Maya, Houston argues that adolescent men were not simply present in images and texts, but central to both.
Playing with Things
More than a thousand years ago on the north coast of Peru, Indigenous Moche artists created a large and significant corpus of sexually explicit ceramic works of art. They depicted a diversity of sex organs and sex acts, and an array of solitary and interconnected human and nonhuman bodies. To the modern eye, these Moche “sex pots,” as Mary Weismantel calls them, are lively and provocative but also enigmatic creations whose import to their original owners seems impossible to grasp. In Playing with Things, Weismantel shows that there is much to be learned from these ancient artifacts, not merely as inert objects from a long-dead past but as vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own hum...
Ceramic Art
"Surviving ceramic vessels buried in tombs, caves, and the earth around the world testify to the earliest human creative activity. By studying ceramics historians uncover the complex ways that societies organized and sustained themselves, as well as how they interacted with other cultures. Today the ceramic arts remain a vibrant artistic medium, as contemporary artists engage with this material history to sustain their own heritage practices, while also shaping new histories from clay. From pre-Columbian Andean tombs to contemporary African sculpture, Ceramic Art considers ceramics as an artistic medium that uniquely records and expresses our individual and collective worlds across cultures....
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Peruvian Featherworks
This title provides an in-depth and authoritative review of feeatherworking traditions in ancient Peru. The book includes a discussion of important recent discoveries, considerations of iconography, and basic technical characteristics of feather works.
Golden Kingdoms
This volume accompanies a major international loan exhibition featuring more than three hundred works of art, many rarely or never before seen in the United States. It traces the development of gold working and other luxury arts in the Americas from antiquity until the arrival of Europeans in the early sixteenth century. Presenting spectacular works from recent excavations in Peru, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico, this exhibition focuses on specific places and times—crucibles of innovation—where artistic exchange, rivalry, and creativity led to the production of some of the greatest works of art known from the ancient Americas. The book and exhibition explore not only...
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Silver, Sword, and Stone
Winner, American Library Association Booklist’s Top of the List, 2019 Adult Nonfiction Acclaimed writer Marie Arana delivers a cultural history of Latin America and the three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone). “Meticulously researched, [this] book’s greatest strengths are the power of its epic narrative, the beauty of its prose, and its rich portrayals of character…Marvelous” (The Washington Post). Leonor Gonzales lives in a tiny community perched 18,000 feet above sea level in the Andean cordillera of Peru, the highest human habitation on earth. Like her late husband, she works the gold mines ...
