The Murals of Cacaxtla

The Murals of Cacaxtla
Author: Claudia Lozoff Brittenham
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2015-02-15
Genre: Art
ISBN:

"Between AD 650 and 950, a small city-state in central Mexico produced dazzling murals of gods, historical figures, and supernatural creatures on the walls of its most important sacred and public spaces. This study explores how the Cacaxtla murals constitute a sustained and local painting tradition, in which generations of ancient Mexican artists, patrons, and audiences created a powerful statement of communal identity that still captures the imagination"--

Women in Ancient America

Women in Ancient America
Author: Karen Olsen Bruhns
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2014-08-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0806147520

This new edition of Women in Ancient America draws on recent advances in the archaeology of gender to reexamine the activities, roles, and relationships of women in the prehistoric Native societies of North, Central, and South America. Women—and women’s work—have been crucial to the survival and success of American peoples since ancient times. And as hunting and foraging societies developed farming techniques and eventually created permanent settlements, women’s roles changed. Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen E. Stothert consider the various economic adaptations that followed, as well as the ways in which women participated in food production and the specialized industries of their societies. They also look at women’s access to power, both political and religious, paying particular attention to the place of priestesses and goddesses in the spiritual life of ancient peoples. The narrative that unfolds in Women in Ancient America is based on the most recent research, using evidence and examples from a wide range of cultures dating from the Paleoindian period to European invasion. This book, unlike others, treats many different types of societies, as the authors develop arguments sure to provoke thinking about the lives of women who inhabited the Americas in the distant past.

Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage

Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage
Author: Sherwin K. Bryant
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2014-11-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469607735

In this pioneering study of slavery in colonial Ecuador and southern Colombia--Spain's Kingdom of Quito--Sherwin Bryant argues that the most fundamental dimension of slavery was governance and the extension of imperial power. Bryant shows that enslaved black captives were foundational to sixteenth-century royal claims on the Americas and elemental to the process of Spanish colonization. Following enslaved Africans from their arrival at the Caribbean port of Cartagena through their journey to Quito, Bryant explores how they lived during their captivity, formed kinships and communal affinities, and pressed for justice within a slave-based Catholic sovereign community. In Cartagena, officials branded African captives with the royal insignia and gave them a Catholic baptism, marking slaves as projections of royal authority and majesty. By licensing and governing Quito's slave trade, the crown claimed sovereignty over slavery, new territories, natural resources, and markets. By adjudicating slavery, royal authorities claimed to govern not only slaves but other colonial subjects as well. Expanding the diaspora paradigm beyond the Atlantic, Bryant's history of the Afro-Andes in the early modern world suggests new answers to the question, what is a slave?

Migrations in Late Mesoamerica

Migrations in Late Mesoamerica
Author: Christopher S. Beekman
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2019-10-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081305723X

Bringing the often-neglected topic of migration to the forefront of ancient Mesoamerican studies, this volume uses an illuminating multidisciplinary approach to address the role of population movements in Mexico and Central America from AD 500 to 1500, the tumultuous centuries before European contact. Clarifying what has to date been chiefly speculation, researchers from the fields of archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, ethnohistory, and art history delve deeply into the causes and impacts of prehistoric migration in the region. They draw on evidence including records of the Nahuatl language, murals painted at the Cacaxtla polity, ceramics in the style known as Coyotlatelco, skeletal samples from multiple sites, and conquest-era accounts of the origins of the Chichén Itzá Maya from both Native and Spanish scribes. The diverse datasets in this volume help reveal the choices and priorities of migrants during times of political, economic, and social changes that unmoored populations from ancestral lands. Migrations in Late Mesoamerica shows how migration patterns are vitally important to study due to their connection to environmental and political disruption in both ancient societies and today’s world. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

The Colors of the New World

The Colors of the New World
Author: Diana Magaloni Kerpel
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1606063294

In August 1576, in the midst of an outbreak of the plague, the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and twenty-two indigenous artists locked themselves inside the school of Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco in Mexico City with a mission: to create nothing less than the first illustrated encyclopedia of the New World. Today this twelve-volume manuscript is preserved in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and is widely known as the Florentine Codex. A monumental achievement, the Florentine Codex is the single most important artistic and historical document for studying the peoples and cultures of pre-Hispanic and colonial Central Mexico. It reflects both indigenous and Spanish traditions of writing and painting, including parallel columns of text in Spanish and Nahuatl and more than two thousand watercolor illustrations prepared in European and Aztec pictorial styles. This volume reveals the complex meanings inherent in the selection of the pigments used in the manuscript, offering a fascinating look into a previously hidden symbolic language. Drawing on cuttingedge approaches in art history, anthropology, and the material sciences, the book sheds new light on one of the world’s great manuscripts—and on a pivotal moment in the early modern Americas.

Handbook to Life in the Aztec World

Handbook to Life in the Aztec World
Author: Manuel Aguilar-Moreno
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195330838

Describes daily life in the Aztec world, including coverage of geography, foods, trades, arts, games, wars, political systems, class structure, religious practices, trading networks, writings, architecture and science.

Maya Art and Architecture

Maya Art and Architecture
Author: Mary Ellen Miller
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-06-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0500204225

“In addition to serving as an introduction to Maya art, the book communicates enthusiasm for the art’s aesthetic power and grace.” —Choice Rewritten and updated to include the discoveries and new theories from the past decade and a half, this classic guide to the art of the ancient Maya is now illustrated in color throughout. World expert Mary Miller and her co-author Megan O’Neil take the reader through the visual world of the Maya, explaining how and why they created the paintings, sculpture, and monuments that intrigue and compel people the world over. With an array of new material, including the newly found La Corona panels, Waka’ figurines, and the Dz’ibanche’ staircase; studies of the monuments at Palenque, Zotz, and elsewhere; and paintings discovered in recent years; this new edition will be essential reading for students and scholars—and for travelers to the cities of this mysterious civilization.

The Murals of Bonampak

The Murals of Bonampak
Author: Mary Ellen Miller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1986
Genre: Bonampak (Mexico)
ISBN: 9780691040332

The Description for this book, The Murals of Bonampak, will be forthcoming.

An Archaeological Guide to Central and Southern Mexico

An Archaeological Guide to Central and Southern Mexico
Author:
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780806133447

A visitor's guide to the ancient Maya cities of Mexico provides photos, descriptions, and up-to-date tourist information on seventy archaeological sites and sixty museums, detailing the art, architecture, and history of each.