Blood and Beauty brings together a diverse, prestigious group of contributors to debate this charged topic in an open, critical and frank interchange. Authors specializing in the anthropology, archaeology, art history, and linguistics of Mesoamerica and Central America bring new data and interpretive strategies to bear on the nature of institutional violence in these ancient societies. The volume covers a broad time frame, from circa 1200 B.C.E. to the sixteenth century, including recent ethnography. The volume endeavors to contextualize violence and violent acts within the matrix of indigenous thought and culture. Chapter topics reflect that desire, including localized, culturally specific, examinations of warfare, sacrifice, ballgames, boxing, pain, and healing. While there is no overarching theoretical perspective, the contributors are sensitive to current theoretical discourse in the field, including recent perspectives on organized violence and the agency of artworks.

Memory Landscapes of the Inka Carved Outcrops: From Past to Present presents a comprehensive analysis of the carved rocks the Inka created in the Andean highlands during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It provides an overview of Inka history, a detailed analysis of the techniques and styles of carving, and five comprehensive case studies. It opens in the Inka capital, Cusco, one of the two locations where the geometric style of Inka carving was authored by the ninth ruler Pachakuti Inka Yupanki. The following chapters move to the origin places on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca and at Pumaurqu, southwest of Cusco, where the Inka constructed the emergence of the first members of their dynasty from sacred rock outcrops. The final case studies focus upon the royal estates of Machu Picchu and Chinchero. Machu Picchu is the second site where Pachakuti appears to have authored the geometric style. Chinchero was built by his son, Thupa Inka Yupanki, who adopted his father's strategy of rock carving and associated political messages. The methodology used in this book reconstructs relational networks between the sculpted outcrops, the land and people and examines how such networks have changed over time. The primary focus documents the specific political context of Inka carved rocks expanded into the performance of a stone ideology, which set Inka stone cults decidedly apart from earlier and later agricultural as well as ritual uses of empowered stones. When the Inka state formed in the mid-fifteenth century, carved rocks were used to mark local territories in and around Cusco. In the process of imperial expansion, selected outcrops were sculpted in peripheral regions to map Inka presence and showcase the cultivated and ordered geography of the state.

Don Smith - or Lelooska, as he was usually called - was a prominent Native American artist and storyteller in the Pacific Northwest. Born in 1933 of "mixed blood" Cherokee heritage, he was adopted as an adult by the prestigious Kwakiutl Sewid clan and had relationships with elders from a wide range of tribal backgrounds. Initially producing curio items for sale to tourists and regalia for Oregon Indians, Lelooska emerged in the late 1950s as one of a handful of artists who proved crucial to the renaissance of Northwest Coast Indian art. He also developed into a supreme performer and educator, staging shows of dances, songs, and storytelling. During the peak years, from the 1970s to the early 1990s, the family shows with Lelooska as the centerpiece attracted as many as 30,000 people annually. In this book, historian and family friend Chris Friday shares and annotates interviews that he conducted with Lelooska, between 1993 and ending shortly before the artist's death, in 1996. This is the story of a man who reached, quite literally, a million or more people in his lifetime and whose life was at once exceptional and emblematic.

Asen, metal sculptures of southern Benin, West Africa, are created to honor the dead and are meant to encourage interaction between visible and spiritual worlds in ancestral rites associated with the belief system known as vodun. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the former Kingdom of Dahomey, Bay traces more than 150 years of transformations in the manufacture and symbolic meanings of asen against the backdrop of a slave-raiding monarchy, domination by French colonialism, and postcolonial political and social change. Bay expertly reads evidence of the area's turbulent history through analysis of asen motifs as she describes the diverse influences affecting the process of asen production from the point of their probable invention to their current decline in use. Paradoxically, asen represent a sacred African art form, yet are created using European materials and technologies and are embellished with figures drawn from tourist production. Bay's meticulously researched artistic and historical study is a fascinating exploration of creativity and change within Benin's culture.

The many 19th and 20th century American Indian collectibles showcased in this book especially embrace authentic weapons and weapon cases, horse gear, tools, stone pipes, and ceremonial items. Actual old trade goods, such as Hudson's Bay collectibles, trade beads, trade cloth, and trade blankets, are also featured. Contemporary replicas of traditional Indian art appear, including clothing, ornamented blankets, pouches and bags, parfleches, and more. Extensive text provides valuable information for collectors on identifying old and new artifacts, plus fascinating background on Indian "hobbyists" around the world. The range of items in each category is comprehensive, and detailed descriptions will be useful for both sellers and collectors. The values reflect actual auction estimates and results. The authors' companion volume, The New Four Winds Guide to American Indian Artifacts, has more Indian-made items of both old and new vintage.

When this book first appeared in 1996, it was "Pottery 101," a basic introduction to the subject. It served as an art book, a history book, and a reference book, but also fun to read, beautiful to look at, and filled with good humor and good sense. After twenty years of faithful service, it's been expanded and brought up-to-date with photographs of more than 1,600 pots from more than 1,600 years. It shows every pottery-producing group in the Southwest, complete with maps that show where each group lives. Now updated, rewritten, and re-photographed, it's a comprehensive study as well as a basic introduction to the art.

A wonderful array of authentic Indian-made items of both old and new vintage is showcased in this engaging book. Nearly 800 color photos present clothing and accessories for men and women, basketry, pottery, musical instruments, toys and games, textiles, beadwork, and Improved Order of Red Men collectibles. An informative bead glossary also describes bead styles, colors, and sizes. All items are accompanied by detailed descriptions, dates, construction information, and current pricing that will be used many times over by sellers and collectors alike. This essential and comprehensive reference belongs on every collector's bookshelf.

In 1500 CE, the Inca empire covered most of South America's Andean region. The empire's leaders first met Europeans on November 15, 1532, when a large Inca army confronted Francisco Pizarro's band of adventurers in the highland Andean valley of Cajamarca, Peru. At few other times in its history would the Inca royal leadership so aggressively showcase its moral authority and political power. Glittering and truculent, what Europeans witnessed at Inca Cajamarca compels revised understandings of pre-contact Inca visual art, spatial practice, and bodily expression. This book takes a fresh look at the encounter at Cajamarca, using the episode to offer a new, art-historical interpretation of pre-contact Inca culture and power. Adam Herring's study offers close readings of Inca and Andean art in a variety of media: architecture and landscape, geoglyphs, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, featherwork and metalwork. The volume is richly illustrated with over sixty color images.

This is the fourth in the five-yearly series of surveys of what is happening in rock art studies around the world. The aims are to present a synthesis of the status of rock art research in different regions of the world, provide information about recent projects, publications, prevailing research objectives and methods, and enable rock art researchers to relate their findings in a specific region to mainstream research results. As always, the texts reflect something of the great differences in approach and emphasis that exist in different regions, presenting examples from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World. Not all rock art areas are covered but some of the gaps in previous volumes have been filled. Papers consider the distribution of sites, chronology, interpretation, new surveys and publications, management and site conservation. Rock art studies are going through a period of scientific and technological development which will have an enormous impact on the quality of recording and dissemination. At the same time, many authors are concerned by problems of preservation and vandalism, and underline the crucial importance of educating local people, and the young, about the importance of this fragile and finite heritage. This aspect too will be of increasing importance in years to come.

The unique cultural landscape of southern Africa (Nambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa) is a highly dynamic and complex area where old traditions are confronted by explosive social and political upheavals. The resulting contradictions and conflicts stimulate a directions as well as ancient roots. The collection of highly varied essays by knowledgeable experts on Africa ranges from historical and political problems to questions of artistic production and of how to deal with culture and nature in the face of industrialisation and globalisation. Art is one of the major subjects, and the contemporary artistic activities, including photography. The publication presents a picture of a vigorously alive southern Africa, contradicting common western Cliches which regard the region as having no art and solely being riddled with problems of post-apartheid, crime and AIDS.

From prehistory to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the Andes have used a visual symbol system-that is, art-to express their sense of the sacred and its immanence in the natural world. Many visual motifs that originated prior to the Incas still appear in Andean art today, despite the onslaught of cultural disruption that native Andeans have endured over several centuries. Indeed, art has always been a unifying power through which Andeans maintain their spirituality, pride, and culture while resisting the oppression of the dominant society. In this book, Mary Strong takes a significantly new approach to Andean art that links prehistoric to contemporary forms through an ethnographic understanding of Indigenous Andean culture. In the first part of the book, she provides a broad historical survey of Andean art that explores how Andean religious concepts have been expressed in art and how artists have responded to cultural encounters and impositions, ranging from invasion and conquest to international labor migration and the internet. In the second part, Strong looks at eight contemporary art types-the scissors dance (danza de tijeras), home altars (retablos), carved gourds (mates), ceramics (ceramica), painted boards (tablas), weavings (textiles), tinware (hojalateria), and Huamanga stone carvings (piedra de Huamanga). She includes prehistoric and historic information about each art form, its religious meaning, the natural environment and sociopolitical processes that help to shape its expression, and how it is constructed or performed by today's artists, many of whom are quoted in the book.

Jewish texts are a hidden treasure of information on Jewish art and artists, the patronage and use of art, and the art created by non-Jews. Most of these texts are written in Hebrew and Aramaic. Those scholars able to read them often do not understand their art-historical importance, while many art historians who would understand the references to art are hindered by language barriers. Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts includes fifty translated texts dating from the bibilical period to the twentieth century. They touch on issues such as iconoclasm, the art of the 'Other', artists and their practices, synagogue architecture, Jewish ceremonial art, and collecting. Through the introduction and essays that accompany each text, Vivian Mann articulates the importance and relevance of these sources to our understanding of art history.

Inuit art, both ancient and contemporary, has inspired the interest of scholars, collectors and art lovers around the globe. This book examines Inuit art from prehistory to the present with special attention to methodology and aesthetics, exploring the ways in which it has been influenced by and has influenced non-Inuit artists and scholars. Part One gives the history of the main art-producing prehistoric traditions in the North American arctic, concentrating on the Dorset who once flourished in the Canadian region. It also demonstrates the influence of theories such as evolutionism, diffusionism, ethnographic comparison, and shamanism on the interpretation of prehistoric Inuit art. Part Two demonstrates the influence of such popular theories as nationalism, primitivism, modernism, and postmodernism on the aesthetics and representation of twentieth-century Canadian Inuit art. This discussion is supported by interviews conducted with Inuit artists. A final chapter shows the presence of Inuit art in the mainstream multi-cultural environment, with a discussion of its influence on Canadian artist Nicola Wojewoda. The work also presents various Inuit artists' reactions to Wojewoda's work.

Alfred C. Haddon began his study of these native fabrics and garments with the collection in the Sarawak museum, Kuching, of which many of the patterns had been identified. His own collection, supplemented by one purchased for him from Dr Charles Hose, is now in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. These sources, together with an examination of the cloths in the British Museum, formed the basis of this memoir, which was originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1936. This was the first time that the beautiful and intimate patterns of Iban textiles had been investigated and illustrated. Laura E. Start contributed a full technical description of the manufacture of the fabrics and provided all the drawings.

The study of the cattle-horned initiation masks of southern Senegal and the Gambia innovatively weaves together art history, history, and cultural anthropology to give a detailed view of Casamance cultures, as they have interacted and changed over the past two centuries. Based on seven field trips to West Africa and fifteen years of research in colonial archives and in museum collections from Dakar to Leipzig, Professor Mark's work presents a subtle interpretation of Casamance horned masquerades, their complex ritual symbolism, and the metaphysical concepts to which they allude. (The masks protect against the power of the kussay, or "sorcerers.") In tracing the cultural interaction and changing identity of the peoples of the Casamance, the author convincingly argues for a new and dynamic approach to art and ethnic identity. Culture should be seen, not as a fixed entity, but as a continuing process. This dynamic model reflects the long history of interaction between Manding and Diola and between Muslim and non-Muslim, a process that has resulted in the creation of hybrid masking forms.

Art and Judaism During the Greco-Roman Period explores the Jewish experience with art during the Greco-Roman period from the Hellenistic period through the rise of Islam. It starts from with the premise that Jewish art in antiquity was a "minority" or "ethnic" art and surveys ways that Jews fully participated in, transformed, and at times rejected the art of their general environment. Art and Judaism focuses upon the politics of identity during the Greco-Roman period, even as it discusses ways that modern identity issues have sometimes distorted and at other times refined scholarly discussion of ancient Jewish material culture. Art and Judaism, the first historical monograph on ancient Jewish art in forty years, evaluates earlier scholarship even as it sets out in new directions. Placing literary sources in careful dialogue with archaeological discoveries, this "New Jewish Archaeology" is an important contribution to Judaic Studies, Religious Studies, Art History, and Classics. The Revised Edition includes a new introduction, additional images, and color plates.

The origins of rock art in Australia are probably as old as that of the hunter-gatherers of Western Europe, well-known for the prehistoric caves of Altamira and Lascaux. That the practice of painting and engraving on rocks continues in parts of northern and central Australia emphasises the importance of this art as a source of visual information for Australia's indigenous communities, Rock art can be 'read' to determine cultural processes and provides a durable record of thousands of years of cultural change. This book is an extensive survey of Australian rock art, presenting detailed case studies revealing the significance of both recent and ancient art for Australia's living indigenous communities. Archaeological data provides evidence of the ways in which rock art traditions have changed over 15,000 or more years in response to changes in the environment, the development of new forms of social organisation and the impact of European colonial settlement.

Believed to represent a king, the beautiful bronze head in the British Museum is one of seventeen objects unearthed in 1938-9 at the town of Ife in Nigeria. The stunning naturalism and sophisticated craftsmanship of the objects challenged Western perceptions of African art at the time, which were largely based around abstract wooden figures. It was consequently assumed at first that they must have been made by Europeans or under European influence. In time, however, they came to be seen as wholly African, probably dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, and representative of a hitherto unknown artistic tradition on that continent. The bronze head from Ife is one of the most prized objects in the British Museum's African collections. This book tells its fascinating story, from its discovery to its reception and exhibition in Britain, where it influenced and inspired several major artists. The author also describes how the head has taken on a new life and significance in its homeland, where images of it have abounded since Nigeria declared independence from Britain in 1960.

In the early twentieth century, Native American baskets, blankets, and bowls could be purchased from department stores, "Indian stores," dealers, and the U.S. government's Indian schools. Men and women across the United States indulged in a widespread passion for collecting Native American art, which they displayed in domestic nooks called "Indian corners." Elizabeth Hutchinson identifies this collecting as part of a larger "Indian craze" and links it to other activities such as the inclusion of Native American artifacts in art exhibitions sponsored by museums, arts and crafts societies, and World's Fairs, and the use of indigenous handicrafts as models for non-Native artists exploring formal abstraction and emerging notions of artistic subjectivity. She argues that the Indian craze convinced policymakers that art was an aspect of "traditional" Native culture worth preserving, an attitude that continues to influence popular attitudes and federal legislation.

Illustrating her argument with images culled from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century publications, Hutchinson revises the standard history of the mainstream interest in Native American material culture as "art." While many locate the development of this cross-cultural interest in the Southwest after the First World War, Hutchinson reveals that it began earlier and spread across the nation from west to east and from reservation to metropolis. She demonstrates that artists, teachers, and critics associated with the development of American modernism, including Arthur Wesley Dow and Gertrude Kasebier, were inspired by Native art. Native artists were also able to achieve some recognition as modern artists, as Hutchinson shows through her discussion of the Winnebago painter and educator Angel DeCora. By taking a transcultural approach, Hutchinson transforms our understanding of the role of Native Americans in modernist culture.

Exploring three major hubs of muralist activity in California, where indigenist imagery is prevalent, Walls of Empowerment celebrates an aesthetic that seeks to firmly establish Chicana/o sociopolitical identity in U.S. territory. Providing readers with a history and genealogy of key muralists' productions, Guisela Latorre also showcases new material and original research on works and artists never before examined in print.

An art form often associated with male creative endeavors, muralism in fact reflects significant contributions by Chicana artists. Encompassing these and other aspects of contemporary dialogues, including the often tense relationship between graffiti and muralism, Walls of Empowerment is a comprehensive study that, unlike many previous endeavors, does not privilege non-public Latina/o art. In addition, Latorre introduces readers to the role of new media, including performance, sculpture, and digital technology, in shaping the muralist's "canvas."

Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, this timely endeavor highlights the ways in which California's Mexican American communities have used images of indigenous peoples to raise awareness of the region's original citizens. Latorre also casts murals as a radical force for decolonization and liberation, and she provides a stirring description of the decades, particularly the late 1960s through 1980s, that saw California's rise as the epicenter of mural production. Blending the perspectives of art history and sociology with firsthand accounts drawn from artists' interviews, Walls of Empowerment represents a crucial turning point in the study of these iconographic artifacts.

The first American national museum designed and run by indigenous peoples, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC opened in 2004. It represents both the United States as a singular nation and the myriad indigenous nations within its borders. Constructed with materials closely connected to Native communities across the continent, the museum contains more than 800,000 objects and three permanent galleries and routinely holds workshops and seminar series.
This first comprehensive look at the National Museum of the American Indian encompasses a variety of perspectives, including those of Natives and non-Natives, museum employees, and outside scholars across disciplines such as cultural studies and criticism, art history, history, museum studies, anthropology, ethnic studies, and Native American studies. The contributors engage in critical dialogues about key aspects of the museum's origin, exhibits, significance, and the relationship between Native Americans and other related museums.

Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico is a cultural history of the missionary enterprise in sixteenth-century Mexico, seen primarily through the work of Catholic missionaries and the native populations, principally the Aztecs. Also known as the Mexica or Nahuas, speakers of the Nahuatl tongue, these Mesoamerican people inhabited the central plateau around Lake Texcoco and the sacred metropolis of Tenochtitlan, the site of present-day Mexico City. It was their language that the mendicant missionaries adopted as the lingua franca of the evangelization enterprise. Conceived as a continuation of his earlier, well-received City, Temple, Stage, Jaime Lara's new work addresses the inculturation of Catholic sacraments and sacramentals into an Aztec worldview in visual and material terms. He argues that Catholic liturgy-similar in some ways to pre-Hispanic worship-effectively "conquered"the religious imagination of its new Mesoamerican practitioners, thus creating the basis for a uniquely Mexican Catholicism. The sixteenth-century friars, in partnership with indigenous Christian converts, successfully translated the Christian message from an exclusively Eurocentric worldview to a system of symbols that made sense to the indigenous civilizations of Central Mexico. While Lara is interested in liturgical texts with novel or recycled metaphors, he is equally interested in visual texts such as neo-Christian architecture, mural painting, feather work, and religious images made from corn. These, he claims, were the sensorial bridges that allowed for a successful, if not wholly orthodox, inculturation of Christianity into the New World. Enriched by more than 280 color images and eleven appendices of translations from Latin and Nahuatl, Lara's study provides rich insights on the development of sacramental practice, popular piety, catechetical drama, and parish politics. Song, dance, flowers, and feathers-of utmost importance in the ancient religion of the Aztecs-were reworked in ingenious ways to serve the Christian cause. Human blood, too, found renewed importance in art and devotion when the indigenous religious leaders and the mendicant friars addressed the fundamental topic of the Man on the cross. An important work on worship, liturgy, and the visual imagination, Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico is a vivid look at a unique cultural adaptation of Christianity. "I have deeply enjoyed and have been intellectually enriched by reading Jaime Lara's Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico. This book will transform how we understand the process of evangelization of Mexico in the sixteenth-century. Clearly written and persuasively argued, Lara reveals how metaphor allows for cross-cultural communication as the deepest level of the Human experience, religious belief. This is demonstrated by a nuanced but richly documented history of the period. Drawing upon architecture, painting and a variety of different kinds of primary sources, this study blends a deep understanding of Aztec religious beliefs so as to articulate the very complex development of Colonial Mexican Christianity. Most importantly, Lara demonstrates how Aztec beliefs and practices were not only incorporated into Catholic teaching and ritual practice, but how they transformed that teaching and practice. Moreover, Lara makes so very evident the centrality of Music and Art in this complicated interaction."-Thomas Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art, Harvard University. "We have seen many interpretations of the story of the faith in America; some have called it 'black,' and others 'white' or 'grey.' Whatever version one may appropriate, Jaime Lara has provided us with a unique, rich focus: the worship experience of a people called to be renewed by Christianity and the creative expressions of Christian faith in unique images and paintings. Jaime Lara's book is a treasure to cherish for many years, an addition to any personal or public Library, and a legacy that engages readers to embark on a journey in which history, liturgical theology, and good art become one's traveling companions."-Rev. Fr. Juan J. Sosa, Presidente, Instituto Nacional Hispano de Liturgia, Inc.

Indigenous museums and cultural centres have sprung up across the developing world, and particularly in the Southwest Pacific. They derive from a number of motives, ranging from the commercial to the cultural political (and many combine both). A close study of this phenomenon is not only valuable for museological practice but, as has been argued, it may challenge our current bedrock assumptions about the very nature and purpose of the museum. This book looks to the future of museum practice through examining how museums have evolved particularly in the non-western world to incorporate the present and the future in the display of culture. Of particular concern is the uses to which historic records are put in the service of community development and cultural renaissance.