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This edition includes new discoveries from Palenque, Mexico, where architecture and sculpture reveal a dramatic eighth century to San Bartolo, Guatemala, where Maya murals of this unprecedented complexity have been uncovered.
Mary Ellen Miller’s rich visual and scholarly survey of pre-Hispanic art and architecture, including the most recent archaeological finds. Expanded and revised in its sixth edition, The Art of Mesoamerica surveys the artistic achievements of the high pre-Hispanic civilizations of Central America—Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, and Aztec—as well as those of their lesser-known contemporaries. Providing an in-depth examination of central works, this book guides readers through the most iconic palaces, pyramids, sculptures, and paintings. From the Olmec colossal head 5 recovered from San Lorenzo to the Aztec calendar stone found in Mexico City’s Zocalo in 1790, this book reveals the complexity and innovation behind the art and architecture produced in pre-Hispanic civilizations. This new edition incorporates fifty new lavish color images and extensive updates based on the latest research and dozens of recent discoveries, particularly in Maya art, where excavations at Teotihuacan, the largest city of Mesoamerica, and Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, have yielded new sculptures.
An up-to-date overview of Mesoamerican cultures from early prehistoric times through the fall of the Aztec Empire, Prehistoric Mesoamerica, Third Edition will be useful and appealing to readers interested in Mesoamerican art, society, politics, and intellectual achievement.
Warfare, ritual human sacrifice, and the rubber ballgame have been the traditional categories through which scholars have examined organized violence in the artistic and material records of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America. This volume expands those traditional categories to include such concerns as gladiatorial-like boxing combats, investiture rites, trophy-head taking and display, dark shamanism, and the subjective pain inherent in acts of violence. Each author examines organized violence as a set of practices grounded in cultural understandings, even when the violence threatens the limits of those understandings. The authors scrutinize the representation of, and relationships between, different types of organized violence, as well as the implications of those activities, which can include the unexpected, such as violence as a means of determining and curing illness, and the use of violence in negotiation strategies.
Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks presents the Olmec portion of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. It illustrates all thirty-nine Olmec art objects in color plates and includes many complementary and comparative black-and-white illustrations and drawings. The body of Pre-Columbian art that Robert Bliss carefully assembled over a half-century between 1912 and 1963, amplified only slightly since his death, is a remarkably significant collection. In addition to their aesthetic quality and artistic significance, the objects hold much information regarding the social worlds and religious and symbolic views of the people who made and used them before the arrival of Europeans in the New World. This volume is the second in a series of catalogues that will treat objects in the Bliss Pre-Columbian Collection. The majority of the Olmec objects in the collection are made of jade, the most precious material for the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica from early times through the sixteenth century. Various items such as masks, statuettes, jewelry, and replicas of weapons and tools were used for ceremonial purposes and served as offerings. Karl Taube brings his expertise on the lifeways and beliefs of ancient Mesoamerican peoples to his study of the Olmec objects in teh Bliss collection. His understanding of jade covers a broad range of knowledge from chemical compositions to geological sources to craft technology to the symbolic power of the green stone. Throughout the book the author emphasizes the role of jade as a powerful symbol of water, fertility, and particularly, of the maize plant which was the fundamental source of life and sustenance for the Olmec. The shiny green of the stone was analogous to the green growth of maize. This fundamental concept was elaborated in specific religious beliefs, many of which were continued and elaborated by later Mesoamerican peoples, such as the Maya. Karl Taube employs his substantial knowledge of Pre-Columbian cultures to explore and explicate Olmec symbolism in this catalogue.
This book will explore past, current, and future policies and trends concerning the sale of antiquities from Mesoamerica. Having outlined gaps in our knowledge, this book seeks to identify the substantive steps that the academic community can take toward affecting transparency, accountability, and ethical practice within the Pre-Columbian antiquities market.
Northeast of modern-day Mexico City stand the remnants of one of the world's largest preindustrial cities, Teotihuacan. Monumental in scale, Teotihuacan is organized along a three-mile-long thoroughfare, the Avenue of the Dead, that leads up to the massive Pyramid of the Moon. Lining the avenue are numerous plazas and temples, which indicate that the city once housed a large population that engaged in complex rituals and ceremonies. Although scholars have studied Teotihuacan for over a century, the precise nature of its religious and political life has remained unclear, in part because no one has yet deciphered the glyphs that may explain much about the city's organization and belief systems. In this groundbreaking book, Annabeth Headrick analyzes Teotihuacan's art and architecture, in the light of archaeological data and Mesoamerican ethnography, to propose a new model for the city's social and political organization. Challenging the view that Teotihuacan was a peaceful city in which disparate groups united in an ideology of solidarity, Headrick instead identifies three social groups that competed for political power—rulers, kin-based groups led by influential lineage heads, and military orders that each had their own animal insignia. Her findings provide the most complete evidence to date that Teotihuacan had powerful rulers who allied with the military to maintain their authority in the face of challenges by the lineage heads. Headrick's analysis also underscores the importance of warfare in Teotihuacan society and clarifies significant aspects of its ritual life, including shamanism and an annual tree-raising ceremony that commemorated the Mesoamerican creation story.
Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica offers the most thorough and up-to-date book-length treatment of Olmec society and culture available.
The Art of Urbanism explores how the royal courts of powerful Mesoamerican centers represented their kingdoms in architectural, iconographic, and cosmological terms. Through an investigation of the ecological contexts and environmental opportunities of urban centers, the contributors consider how ancient Mesoamerican cities defined themselves and reflected upon their physicalâe"and metaphysicalâe"place via their built environment. Themes in the volume include the ways in which a kingdomâe(tm)s public monuments were fashioned to reflect geographic space, patron gods, and mythology, and how the Olmec, Maya, Mexica, Zapotecs, and others sought to center their world through architectural monuments and public art. This collection of papers addresses how communities leveraged their environment and built upon their cultural and historical roots as well as the ways that the performance of calendrical rituals and other public events tied individuals and communities to both urban centers and hinterlands. Twenty-three scholars from archaeology, anthropology, art history, and religious studies contribute new data and new perspectives to the understanding of ancient Mesoamericansâe(tm) own view of their spectacular urban and ritual centers.