Ancient Americas

Publications

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Description: The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00118
Marking the Columbus quincentennial, this catalog of a traveling exhibition explores the common threads in fourteen pre-Columbian cultures, from the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec of Mexico and Guatemala through the Chavin culture (900–200 B.C.) of the Andes to the Moche, Chimu, and the Inca empire. The book contains essays from 26 scholars examining sacred geographies, myths, and ancient beliefs as they are transmitted through visual arts and architecture.

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Author
Print publication date December 1998 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780865591042
EISBN 9780300226997
Illustrations 427
Print Status in print
Description: Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00016
This volume documents the splendid accomplishments of Ancient West Mexico, and brings together some of its finest examples of sculptural art, including representations of people, animals and plants, as well as vessels and models of houses, ceremonial centres, ball games and ritual scenes. All the extraordinary earthenware figures illustrated here have been recovered from burial sites and shaft tombs. They represent a wide range of subjects — warriors, chieftains, ladies, acrobats, shamans, musicians, ball players, festival couples and bound prisoners — in a variety of styles from about 200 BC to AD 800 — that compose the artistic canon of Ancient West Mexico, a region encompassing the modern states of Colima, Jalisco and Nayarit.
Author
Print publication date January 1998 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780500050927
EISBN 9780300222074
Illustrations 415
Print Status in print
Description: The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya and Andean Peoples
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00123
Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

This important book examines the development of the principal styles of ancient American architecture, sculpture, and painting until the end of the Aztec and Inca empires in the sixteenth century. Written by esteemed scholar George Kubler, the volume aims to explain works of art as such, rather than dwelling upon those ideas about civilization that art is often made to illustrate in books of a more archaeological character. The Art and Architecture of Ancient America is arranged by geographical regions in three main divisions: Mexico, Central America and western South America. Architecture, sculpture, and painting occupy most of the volume, but town planning, pottery, textiles, and jewelry are also discussed. Many of the illustrations portray little known sites, buildings, and objects.

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Print publication date November 1992 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300053258
EISBN 9780300225594
Illustrations 448
Print Status in print
Description: Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00019
This nuanced account explores Maya mythology through the lens of art, text, and culture. It offers an important reexamination of the mid-16th-century Popol Vuh, long considered an authoritative text, which is better understood as one among many crucial sources for the interpretation of ancient Maya art and myth. Using materials gathered across Mesoamerica, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos bridges the gap between written texts and artistic representations, identifying key mythical subjects and uncovering their variations in narratives and visual depictions. Central characters—including a secluded young goddess, a malevolent grandmother, a dead father, and the young gods who became the sun and the moon—are identified in pottery, sculpture, mural painting, and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Highlighting such previously overlooked topics as sexuality and generational struggles, this beautifully illustrated book paves the way for a new understanding of Maya myths and their lavish expression in ancient art.
Print publication date April 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300207170
EISBN 9780300247008
Illustrations 152
Print Status in print
Description: Casas Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00030
In the flourishing ancient Indian communities of the American Southwest and northwest Mexico, master potters created ceramic arts that are considered among the most accomplished in the world. The symbolic imagery and distinctive local styles of the region are unmistakable—simple volumetric shapes covered with complex, interlocking geometrical designs that are sometimes combined with bold abstract animal, human, and composite figures. Within this shared tradition are clearly identifiable local styles and symbolic vocabularies, and this lavishly illustrated book focuses on one of them: the ceramic works of the Casas Grandes-Paquimé area of northwest Mexico and adjoining parts of New Mexico and Arizona, c. A.D. 1200–1400.

For the first time on a comprehensive scale, expert art historians and an artist-teacher discuss the complex imagery of approximately ninety Casas Grandes vessels with fifty pieces representing other major styles of the Greater Southwest. Superb examples show polychromatic designs of real and mythological animals, together with abstract human figures and remarkably varied geometries, demonstrating the imaginative complexity and exceptional achievement of the Casas Grandes potters. Certain motifs reflect affinities with distant Mesoamerica, yet the authors show that these forms were absorbed into a visual vocabulary that reflected the unique artistic and cosmological outlook of Casas Grandes, within the native Southwestern cultural tradition.
Author
Print publication date October 2005 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300111484
EISBN 9780300227000
Illustrations 240
Print Status in print
Description: Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00046
In this book one of the pioneering thinkers in the history of Pre-Columbian art considers the varying esthetic responses of Native Americans, Europeans, and Americanists to indigenous art of the Americas. George Kubler chronicles the lives and writings of seventy historians, explorers, missionaries, archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians who lived between 1492 and 1984 and who devoted sustained attention to Amerindian art. His “biographical surroundings” focus on how these individuals differed in their ways of evaluating Amerindian art forms and what this reveals both about the art and about the development of esthetic thought.

Drawing on such sources as writings about Renaissance travels and military actions, the records of church missionaries in converting and resettling native peoples, statements by native and European historians in the seventeenth century, debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about the worth of America to the world, archaeological and anthropological research since the mid-nineteenth century, and recent esthetic theories about ancient American art, Kubler presents the impressions of individuals form Columbus to Diego de Landa to Charles Darwin to Alfred Kroeber and Alfonso Caso. The book also includes and discusses drawings and photographs by travelers and explorers. Kubler’s historiographic approach allows us to view Amerindian art from a fresh and challenging perspective.
Print publication date January 1991 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300046328
EISBN 9780300222043
Illustrations 54
Print Status in print
Description: The Glassell Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Masterworks of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00243
One of the world's top hundred art collectors, Alfred C. Glassell, Jr. (1913–2008), was fascinated by gold, but not for its monetary value. Glassell valued instead the spiritual significance that gold held in many ancient cultures, particularly those of Africa, South America, and Indonesia. Over the years, he acquired an astonishing number of artworks, assembling the largest privately held collection of Pre-Columbian gold. From 1997 to 2004, Glassell donated works of African and Indonesian gold to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Upon his death in 2008, he bequeathed his collection of Pre-Columbian gold to the museum. 

Masterworks of Pre-Columbian, Indonesian, and African Gold explores two hundred of these dazzling works, many published here for the first time. Spanning from 2000 B.C. to A.D. 1600, these precious objects reflect a variety of cultures, such as the Calima, Quimbaya, Sicán, Moché, and Coclé, and a range of geographic locations, from Mexico to Argentina and from Africa to Indonesia. The book offers fresh insights into the enduring appeal of gold and its artistic manifestations in diverse cultures.

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Print publication date March 2012 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300175950
EISBN 9780300260809
Illustrations 224
Print Status out of print
Description: The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00151
For the Classic Maya, who flourished in and around the Yucatan peninsula in the first millennium AD, artistic materials were endowed with an internal life. Far from being inert substances, jade, flint, obsidian, and wood held a vital essence, agency, and even personality. To work with these materials was to coax their life into full expression and to engage in witty play. Writing, too, could shift from hieroglyphic signs into vibrant glyphs that sprouted torsos, hands, and feet. Appearing to sing, grapple, and feed, they effectively blurred the distinction between text and image.

In this first full study of the nature of Maya materials and animism, renowned Mayanist scholar Stephen Houston provides startling insights into a Pre-Columbian worldview that dramatically contrasts with western perspectives. Illustrated with more than one hundred photographs, images, and drawings, this beautifully written book reveals the Maya quest for transcendence in the face of inevitable death and decay.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2014 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300196023
EISBN 9780300225587
Illustrations 114
Print Status in print
Description: Pre-Columbian Art of Mexico and Central America
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00095
This handbook serves as the first comprehensive publication of the Yale University Art Gallery's distinguished collection of Precolumbian art, which features notable pieces from throughout Mesoamerica and from every period. The nearly 300 object entries are arranged by region and include historical, iconographical, and structural information. A mineralogical study of the collection includes an explanation of the methods used to make the attributions, as well as a description of the minerals themselves. Clearly organized and thoroughly researched, this publication is an essential reference for scholars, students, and collectors of Precolumbian art.
Print publication date January 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780894670398
EISBN 9780300232660
Illustrations 270 Images
Print Status out of print
Description: The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00157
First published in 1962, The Shape of Time presented a radically new approach to the study of art history. Drawing upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics, George Kubler pursues such questions as the nature of time, the nature of change, and the meaning of invention.  The result is a view of historical sequence aligned on continuous change more than upon the static notion of style—the usual basis for conventional histories of art. Since its publication, the book has become a classic in the field.
Print publication date September 1962 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300100617
EISBN 9780300232561
Illustrations 0
Print Status in print
Description: Small-Great Objects: Anni and Josef Albers in the Americas
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00113
Small-Great Objects presents a remarkable look into the art-collecting practices of two of modern art's most widely influential figures, Anni (1899–1994) and Josef (1888–1976) Albers. Their impressive collection of over 1,400 objects from Latin America, namely Mexico and Peru, represents a conscious endeavor that goes well beyond that of a casual hobby, displaying a deep appreciation for the art, textiles, and overall ingenuity of the ancient American world. This insightful book draws on primary-source materials such as the couple's letters, personal papers, and archival photographs—many never before published—and demonstrates their conviction that these Prehispanic objects displayed a formal sophistication and bold abstraction that defy the prevalent conception of the works as "primitive." Moreover, it shows how the Alberses spread their appreciation of the ancient world to others, through their teachings, their writings, and their own art practices.
Print publication date March 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300225693
EISBN 9780300232523
Illustrations 56 color + 18 b/w illus.
Print Status in print
Description: Urban Images of the Hispanic World: 1493–1793
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00278
This engrossing book examines the particular importance of cities in Spanish and Hispanic-American culture as well as the different meanings that artists and cartographers invested in their depiction of New and Old World cities and towns. Kagan maintains that cities are both built structures and human communities, and that representations of the urban form reflect both points of view. He discusses the peculiar character of Spain’s “empire of towns”; the history and development of the cityscape as an independent artistic genre, both in Europe and in the Americas; the interaction between European and native mapping traditions; differences between European maps of urban America and those produced by local residents, whether native or creole; and the urban iconography of four different New World towns. Lavishly illustrated with a variety of maps, pictures, and plans, many reproduced here for the first time, this interdisciplinary study will be of interest to general readers and to specialists in art history, cartography, history, urbanism, and related fields.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2000 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300083149
EISBN 9780300266221
Illustrations 166
Print Status out of print