A system of myths, symbols, and rituals, dating back to the Paleolithic and Neolithic, survives in present-day imagery. In exploring this system, special attention is drawn to the linkage between ancient and contemporary civilizations of Eurasia and Mesoamerica, as seen in their cosmology, and expressed in common mythological and iconographic themes. The author examines contemporary Middle American and eastern European textiles, especially women's garments, that contain an elaborated sacred code of symbols, and include remnants of the four horizontal directions, and the three vertical worlds that portray the structure of the universe. The cosmology contained in patterns around the world denotes striking parallels that attest to internal connections between different cultures, beyond time and place.

Why did the ancient artists create paintings and engravings? What did the images mean? This careful study of rock art motifs in the Trans-Pecos area of Texas and a small area in South Africa demonstrates that there are archaeological and anthropological ways of accessing the past in order to investigate and explain the significance of rock art motifs. Using two disparate regions shows the possibility of comparative rock art studies and highlights the importance of regional studies and regional variations. This is an ideal resource for students and researchers.

Here are India's best-known beasts -- tiger, elephant, deer, snake... rendered by a variety of folk and tribal artists. Each of their artistic traditions conceives of the beast in distinctive ways, as original in the imagining as it is in the rendering. This handmade book is a new updated version of our classic Beasts of India, long out of print. Individually screenprinted on handmade paper, this wonderful introduction to Indian painting styles is an art and book lover's dream.

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.

Performing the jumbled city is a complex artefact beyond its own materiality. Linked to a dedicated website hosting additional audio-visual materials, the book acts as a connecting device allowing an exchange between texts, audio-visual materials, and original artworks, situating it in the emerging field of multi-modal ethnography. From this stance, and as an edited collection co-authored with urban indigenous artists and activists, it interrogates the ways in which knowledge is built and shared. The book is constructed as a particular kind of edited collection, shifting between different authorships. The resulting interaction between individual and collective essays draws together scholars' and activists' perspectives in a rich exchange between textual, visual and dramatic sections, for the book is organised around the original script of the site-specific performance Santiago Waria, and the related exhibition MapsUrbe. Making a claim for creation, rather than recuperation, the essays contained in the book put forward alternative imaginations that disrupt the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city, defying the spatialities usually assigned to colonised bodies and subjects. As such, and actively engaging with current debates through collective writing by indigenous people raising questions in terms of decolonisation, the book stands as both an academic and a political project, interrogating the relationship between activism and academia, and issues of representation, authorship, and knowledge production. -- .

Only 1000 copies of People of the Eland were printed in 1976. It was neither reissued nor reprinted. It has become one of the rarest and most expensive of all books on the African past. One of the things that most disturbed Patricia Vinnicombe while she was working at the Rock Art Research Institute at Wits in the early 2000s was that students could not access her book. As in many libraries, Wits University locks People of the Eland away in its rare and valuable book section. In 2002, Pat started to explore the possibility of republication. But, she did not feel that the book could be reissued without adding additional sections to explain how knowledge had expanded in the decades since the publication of the book. Tragically, Pat died in March 2003 before she could start work on the new sections. Peter Mitchell and Ben Smith have taken up this challenge and brought together the leading scholars in the field to write new sections to explain both how knowledge has changed since the publication of People of the Eland, and how current research is still influenced by this landmark volume. The Eland's People is thus intended as a companion volume to People of the Eland and it is hoped that this new volume will provide a richer appreciation of the importance of Pat's original work, as well as allowing readers an overview of current understandings of Drakensberg rock art.

The delightful arts of American Indian tribes in the Southwest are occasionally made in miniature by especially talented artists who dare to work in tiny scale. This book presents, for the first time, a wide array of these miniatures of al the major craft styles of the region. Shown through hundreds of all color photographs, the miniature arts are arranged in sections devoted to beadwork, rattles, sandpaintings, weavings, basketry, Kachinas, paintings, and pottery. The weavings section includes geometric and pictorial styles from each of the regional areas, while the basketry and pottery sections have all the major style areas represented. Wherever possible, the artists and their regions are identified. This collection of truly appealing tiny art works will be enjoyed for many years to come.

Focusing on the collection of art from Liberia and Sierra Leone assembled by the late museum curator and scholar William Siegmann, this book beautifully documents works in stone, wood, metal, ivory, and cloth created between the 14th and 20th centuries by artists from more than a dozen West African ethnic groups.

Contributors include Mariane Ferme, Barbara C. Johnson, Christine Kreamer, Nanina Guyer, Daniel Reed, and Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers.

Delve into the origins and contemporary interpretations of various styles of non-figural Zuni jewelry designs, including nugget work, cluster work, petit point, needle point, snake eye, and channel work. This groundbreaking study establishes the identities of many Zuni artists from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, and showcases their turquoise and coral pins, bracelets, bolo ties, and other ornaments. Featured are more than fifteen pieces each by masters, past and present, such as Doris and Warren Ondelacy, Alice and Duane Quam, Fannie Weebothee Ondelacy, Julie Ondelacy Lahi, Lee and Mary Weebothee, Alice Leekya Homer, and Ellen Quandelacy. More than three hundred vibrant color photos reveal subtle variations that indicate each master s distinctive style. Published here, for the first time, are cluster work bracelets by Leekya Deyuse, the single most famous jeweler in the Southwest, and Dan Simplicio s nugget work, along with ways to distinguish his from other artists works."

Roads, Mobility, and Violence in Indigenous Literature and Art from North America explores mobility, spatialized violence, and geographies of activism in a diverse archive of literary and visual art by Indigenous authors and artists. Building on Raymond Williams's observation that "traffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form of social relations," this book pulls into focus racial, sexual, and environmental violence localized around roads. Reading this archive of texts next to lived struggles over spatial justice, Rymhs argues that roads are spaces of complex signification. For many Indigenous communities, the road has not often been so open. Recent Indigenous writing and visual art explores this tension between mobility and confinement. Drawing primarily on the work of Marie Clements, Tomson Highway, Marilyn Dumont, Leanne Simpson, Richard Van Camp, Kent Monkman, and Louise Erdrich, this volume examines histories of uprooting and violence associated with roads. Along with exploring these fraught histories of mobility, this book emphasizes various ways in which Indigenous communities have transformed roads into sites of political resistance and social memory.

Sometimes referred to as a Navajo folk art, these representations of recognizable objects occasionally have been designed into Navajo weavings at least since the middle of the nineteenth century. Unlike the geometric designs of more traditional Navajo rugs, these delightful pictorial images include scenes from everyday life, animals, landscapes, spelled-out words and designs of ceremonial significance. The pictorial weaving are shown through hundreds of color photographs with new as well as older examples. Here are familiar and imaginary animals, birds, people, religious designs and multiple weavings of fantastic detail. They convey, through dynamic color schemes and bold designs, images important to the Navajo weavers: the light and happy reflections of their scenic lands. The pictorial rugs are arranged chronologically within design groups to demonstrate the evolution of styles. Whenever known, the weavers are identified by name and region. It is their creativity that breathes life into these pictorial images and conveys the lively spirit of their lives.

Explore the life and art of legendary Navajo silversmith Fred Peshlakai, and see how his masterful art began and evolved. Beginning with the history of the Navajo people, it follows world events impacting the American Southwest and the Navajo culture precipitating in the development of their unique expressions of art rendered with silver and stone. Nineteenth-century evolution of the art form is reviewed, shining a particular light on certain ambiguities regarding important interrelationships between its most famous figures. Fred Peshlakai hailed from one of the most recognized artistic bloodlines of his noble people. This book is the beginning catalogue of his beautiful silver artwork with hundreds of images and their individual technical and artistic expressions discussed. No longer mythical, Fred Peshlakai is shown to be one of the most, if not the most, influential Navajo artisan to impact the creation of Navajo Silver Art and his art the world-class art treasures that they truly are.

What does rock art say about gender and how can our understanding of gender shape the way that we view rock art? A significant contribution to the relatively unexplored field of gender in rock art, this volume contains a wealth of information for archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians interested in past gender systems. Hays-Gilpin argues that art is at once a product of its physical and social environment and at the same time a tool of influence in shaping behavior and ideas within a society. Taking this stance, rock art is shown to be very often one of the strongest lines of evidence avaliable to scholars in understanding ritual practices, gender roles, and ideologicial constructs of prehistoric peoples. Subsequently issues of representation and the people who made these forms of art are also discussed.

A timely re-examination of European engagements with indigenous art and the presence of indigenous art in the contemporary art world. The arts of Africa, Oceania and native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. The politics of such stimulus, however, have long been highly contentious: was this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation? This revelatory book explores cross-cultural art through the lens of settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans made new nations, displacing and outnumbering but never eclipsing native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, visual art has loomed large. Settler artists and designers drew upon Indigenous motifs and styles in their search for distinctive identities. Yet powerful Indigenous art traditions have asserted the presence of First Nations peoples and their claims to place, history and sovereignty. Cultural exchange has been a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: contemporary Indigenous art draws on global contemporary practice, but moves beyond a bland affirmation of hybrid identities to insist on the enduring values and attachment to place of Indigenous peoples.

""This is a stimulating book, which covers much new material Scholarship on sub-Saharan Africa is very thinly theorized. Few scholars seem to have the range to make connections with art practice elsewhere and generally offer interpretations which struggle to get beyond ethnographic documentation. Few monographs engage with the wider debates. This book is an exception.""
--John Mack, Professor, University of East Anglia (UK)

"African Dream Machines" takes African headrests out of the category of functional objects and into the more rarefied category of "art" objects. Styles in African headrests are usually defined in terms of Western art and archaeological discourses, but this book interrogates these definitions and demonstrates the shortcomings of defining a single formal style model as exclusive to a single ethnic group.

This book has been in the making for fifteen years, starting with research on the traditional woodcarving of the Shona-and Venda-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe and South Africa. Among the artifacts made by South African peoples, headrests were the best known and during a year spent in Europe in 1975-1976, Anitra Nettleton discovered museum stores full of unacknowledged masterpieces made by speakers of numerous Southern African languages. A Council Fellowship from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1990 enabled the writer to develop an archive in the form of notes, photographs, and sketches of each and every headrest she encountered. Many examples from South African collections were added from the early 1990s onwards, expanding the field vastly. Nettelton executed drawings of each and every headrest encountered, and they became a major part of the project in their own right.

"African Dream Machines" questions the assumed one-to-one relationship between formal styles and ethnic identities or classifications. Historical factors are used to demonstrate that "authenticity," in the form sought by collectors of antique African art, is largely a construct.

"Anitra Nettleton" is a professor in the Wits School of Arts, Johannesburg (South Africa). This manuscript was awarded the University of the Witwatersrand Research Committee Publication Award in 2006.

The artist-makers represented here come from every region of the United States, making this book a compilation of many native traditions as well as modern styles. Exciting background ideas are expressed in the details of these works, so their study and appreciation is quite fascinating. Over 50 living jewelry masters of Native American heritage are featured in this lavish new book. Their dynamic work includes many pieces that were awarded at recent juried shows. Tufa casting, stone cutting, engraving, metalsmithing, and other technical skills that are highly refined and personalized are evident, demonstrating the work of true Masters in this evolving field. See and be inspired by new designs in bead necklaces, silver bracelets, pendants, pins, earrings, belts, and rings, as well as sculpture that ranks as wearable art. Marvel at the new pieces by top masters living today.

The Grimms called them The Quiet Folk, in Maori they are Patupaiarehe, in Wales Y Tylwyth Teg: hidden people who live unseen, speak their own languages and move around like migrants, shrouded from our eyes - like those who lived in the utopian world of Plant Rhys Ddwfn off the west Welsh coast, where this book begins. In mythology, lost lands are coral castles beneath the sea, ancient forests where spirits live, and mountain swamps where trolls lurk. Strip away the mythology, and they become valleys and villages flooded to provide drinking water to neighbouring kingdoms, campsites where travellers are told they can't travel, and reservations where the rights of first nations people are ignored. The folk tales in this book tell of these lost lands and hidden people, remembered through migrations, dreams and memories.

Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Cote d'Ivoire is an investigation of the methods employed by art historians who study creative production in Africa. While providing insights into the rich visual arts of the Lagoon Peoples of southeastern Cote d'Ivoire, this study is one of the few attempts by an Africanist to situate local and regional artistic practices in the context of the global art market, and to trace the varied receptions an African art work is given as it leaves a local context and enters an international one. Drawing on her three seasons of fieldwork among Akan populations in Cote d'Ivoire, Monica Blackmun Visona provides a comprehensive account of a major art-producing region of Africa, and explores such topics as gender roles in performance, the role of sculpture in divination, and the interchange of arts and ideas across ethnic boundaries. The book also addresses issues inherent in research practices, such as connoisseurship and participant observation, and examines theoretical positions that have had an impact on the discipline of African art history.

A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging among contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers-and settlers-into the territories of the old and new worlds. In the twentieth century, abstract expressionism transformed painting to encompass something beyond the visual world, and, later, minimalism and the Land Art movement broadened the genre of landscape art to include sculptural forms and site-specific installations. In Shifting Grounds, art historian Kate Morris argues that Indigenous artists are expanding and reconceptualizing the forms of the genre, expressing Indigenous attitudes toward land and belonging even as they draw upon mainstream art practices. The resulting works evoke all five senses: from the overt sensuality of Kay WalkingStick's tactile paintings to the eerie soundscapes of Alan Michelson's videos to the immersive environments of Kent Monkman's dioramas, this art resonates with a fully embodied and embedded subjectivity. Shifting Grounds explores themes of presence and absence, survival and vulnerability, memory and commemoration, and power and resistance, illuminating the artists' engagement not only with land and landscape but also with the history of representation itself.

Detailed biographies describe the lives of twelve collectors of tribal art in Britain, active between 1770 and 1990. These men were rarely field collectors and only occasional travellers, but they were vigorous hunters, for whom the pursuit, handling and possession of such objects was what mattered. The climax of the period of collecting from around 1880 to 1960 coincided with the maximum extent of Empire, when legions of explorers, missionaries, administrators, traders and military personnel brought back to Britain an inexhaustible quantity of exotic material. The sources for the collections included most of Africa, the Americas and the Pacific, as well as tribal societies in Asia. The collectors described here - a interesting mix of highly individualistic, eccentric and sometimes avaricious men - could, and did, quite reasonably claim that they were saving ethnographic material for the future. This was partly based on the widely held notion that tribal cultures were disappearing and the idea that some museums were negligent and uninterested in ethnography. Several of the collectors eventually created museums themselves, most notably Pitt Rivers. Contemporary illustrations and recent photography of the objects are accompanied by evocative photographs of the collectors amongst their collections.

Discover the ancient images in ancient landscapes through this guide. Learn how the designs were created and what is known about the people who made them. A directory to 28 outstanding sites in 7 states. Includes an information guide to southwestern research centers, websites, and national and international rock-art organizations.

Nearly 200 photographs chronicle the evolution of Hopi jewelry over the last four decades and illustrate, through the Kopavi collection, the innovative and often stunning creations of twelve well-known Hopi artists. Included are Victor Coochwytewa, Phillip Honanie, and Michael Kabotie, as well as Ricky Coochwytewa, Sidney Sekakuku, Sharold Nutumya, Watson Honanie, Bradley Gashwazra, Norman Honie Sr., John Coochyumptewa, Beauford Dawahoya, and Jason Takala Sr. The artists incorporate gold, platinum, diamonds, and rare turquoise into a tradition previously identified predominantly with silver, while expanding the range of designs to include narrative and ceremonial representations. Some of the iconography speaks to the merging of two cultures: ancient Hopi and contemporary commodity. These objects have a historical voice and represent a major change not only in jewelry styles, but in Hopi culture."

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.

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.