"Andean Art at Dumbarton Oaks" presents the Andean portion of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. It superbly illustrates all 133 Andean 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, and which has been amplified slightly since his death, is a remarkably significant collection. These works of art are among the finest examples of the visual arts produced by Andean cultures.

This Andean volume is the first in a series of four catalogues that will treat the entirety of the Bliss Pre-Columbian collection; the others planned will focus on objects from eastern Mesoamerica (Olmec and Maya), western Mesoamerica (Teotihuacan, Veracruz, Mixtec, and Aztec), and Lower Central America.

"Andean Art" is composed of five topical essays, shorter essays on the Andean cultures represented in the collection, and discussions of the individual objects. These were written by specialists in Pre-Columbian art, presenting the latest in scholarly thinking on Andean cultures and the objects. All thirteen authors bring broad perspectives from Andean culture history, archaeology, and art history to their contributions, but they focus their attentions primarily on the objects themselves, in order to provide meaningful contexts for them and to highlight how these objects, as works of art created and used purposefully, reveal special qualities of Andean culture.

The reader is provided with a fine sense of how the creators and original owners of the pieces in the Bliss collection used and valued these artworks on many levels. The authors also place individual objets alongside others of their type in so far as possible. An extraordinary feature of this volume is the technical descriptions of the metal objects provided by metals specialist Heather Lechtman.

For centuries, indigenous rulers of Mesoamerica commissioned elaborate pictorial histories to maintain their claims to power, land, and privilege - a practice they continued under Spanish authority after the conquest. The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec is one such history. An intricate pictographic document on cotton cloth measuring 156 by 66.5 inches, the lienzo was produced by an Indian painter-scribe of great skill during the sixteenth century in the northern Mixteca, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It depicts events dating from the eleventh century to the early years of the Spanish colony. Housed since 1919 in the Royal Ontario Museum of Canada, the lienzo is a work of such complexity and reach that few scholars possess the tools to understand its message and context. The contributors to this volume are among that select few. In four chapters, front matter, and two appendices accompanied by detailed, full-color illustrations, scholars Arni Brownstone, Nicholas Johnson, Bas van Doesburg, Eckehard Dolinski, Michael Swanton, and Elizabeth Hill Boone describe what a lienzo is and how it was made. They also explain the particular origin, format, and content of the Lienzo of Tlapiltepec - as well as its place within the larger world of Mexican painted history. The contributors furthermore explore the artistry and visual experience of the work. A final essay documents past illustrations of the lienzo, including the one rendered for this book, which employed innovative processes to recover long faded colors. Unique in its detail, scope, and depth, this is the first volume to offer a full description and analysis of the Lienzo of Tlapiltepec and to grant widespread access to this extraordinary repository of history.

Writing and recording are key cultural activities that allow humans to communicate across time and space. Whereas Old World writing evolved into the alphabetic system that is now employed around the world, the indigenous peoples in the Americas autonomously developed alternative systems that conveyed knowledge in a tangible medium. New World systems range from the hieroglyphic script of the Maya, to the figural and iconic pictographies of the Aztecs, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs in Mexico and the Moche in Peru, to the abstract knotted khipus of the Andes. Like Old World writing, these systems represented a cultural category that was fundamental to the workings of their societies, one that was heavily impregnated with cultural value.

The fifteen contributors to "Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America" consider substantive and theoretical issues concerning writing and signing systems in the ancient Americas. They present the latest thinking about these graphic and tactile systems of communication. Their variety of perspectives and their advances in decipherment and understanding constitute a major contribution not only to our understanding of Pre-Columbian and indigenous American cultures but also to our comparative and global understanding of writing and literacy.

The history of Pre-Columbian collecting is a social and aesthetic history--of ideas, people and organizations, and objects. This richly illustrated volume examines these histories by considering the collection and display of Pre-Columbian objects in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Some of the thirteen essays locate the collecting process within its broader cultural setting in order to explain how and why such collections were formed, while others consider how collections have served as documents of culture within the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, and as objects of fine art or aesthetic statements within the art and art historical worlds. Nearly all contemplate how such collections have been used as active signifiers of political, economic, and cultural power. The thirteen essays were originally presented at a symposium commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Pre-Columbian Collection at Dumbarton Oaks. They continue to be groundbreaking contributions to the histories of collecting and Pre-Columbian art.

Important anthology marking, but not celebrating, the Columbian Quincentenary, directing attention to indigenous cultural responses to the Spanish intrusion in Mexico and Peru, utilizing as much as possible native documents and sources, and exploring mentalities. While we can benefit from the analysis and methodology in all contributions to this volume, items certain to interest Mesoamericanists include: Hill Boone, 'Introduction,' for the volume's orientation; Laiou, 'The Many Faces of Medieval Colonization,' for background, analysis of colonization as process, and its multiple forms; Lockhart, 'Three Experiences of Culture Contact: Nahua, Maya, and Quechua,' for special attention to language change as a reflection of broader cultural evolution in key areas; Hill Boone, 'Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Postconquest Mexico,' for an examination of the endurance of these forms in 16th-century Nahua culture; Wood, 'The Social vs. Legal Context of Nahuatl Tâitulos,' for an examination of community self-representation in native manuscripts and pictorials in the eighteenth century; Gillespie, 'The Triple Alliance: A Postconquest Tradition,' for an explanation of the colonial manipulation of the symbolic triadic organization for a new historical tradition; Burkhart, 'Pious Performances: Christian Pageantry and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico,' for a study of the Nahuas' reshaping of Christian ritual; Karttunen, 'Indigenous Writing as a Vehicle of Postconquest Continuity and Change in Mesoamerica,' for an examination of Nahua and Maya writing traditions into the present, including evidence of women's lesser but possibly significant role; and, Cummins, 'Native Traditions in the Postconquest World: Commentary,' for concluding reflections on the interrelated elements of text (written, performative, visual, auratic, and so on), image, discourse, language, traditions, identity, and colonialism"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Based on a ten-week working seminar in 1986, offers new interpretations of the extent, organization, and imperial strategies of the Aztec empire. Analyzes data from the major chroniclers and from individual towns and places throughout the empire. Information obtained from early colonial Spanish administrative documents and archaeology is presented in appendices"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

The Aztecs and Mixtecs of ancient Mexico recorded their histories in long oral narratives and in images painted on hide, paper, and cloth, which served to keep the fundamental features of the stories pure. The tradition of painting history continued even after the Spanish Conquest, for the indigenous rulers and important native families still needed documents to support their respective positions, and the Spaniards accepted the pictorial histories as valid records of the past. Out of the wealth of documentation that once existed, five Pre-Columbian and some 150 early colonial painted histories survive today.

This extensively and beautifully illustrated book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Mexican painted history as an intellectual, documentary, and pictorial genre. Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how the Mexican historians conceptualized and painted their past and introduces readers to the major pictorial records: the Aztec annals and cartographic histories and the Mixtec screenfolds and lienzos.

Boone focuses her analysis on the kinds of stories told in the histories and on how the manuscripts work pictorially to encode, organize, and preserve these narratives. This twofold investigation broadens our understanding of how preconquest Mexicans understood and presented themselves and how they used pictographic history for political an social ends. It also demonstrates how graphic writing systems developed, like mathematical or musical notation, to convey meaning directly and without a detour through speech, creating a broadly understood corpus of visual conventions that communicated effectively across ethnic and linguistic boundaries.

This book will be important readingnot only for scholars of ancient Mexico, but also for avocational students of Pre-Columbian history who want to learn to read the Aztec and Mixtec codices and learn their stories and legends. Likewise, it offers food for thought to scholars in a variety of disciplines who think comparatively about histories and/or graphic systems of communication.

This interdisciplinary collection of articles focuses on pictorial and iconic systems of the Maya, Mixtec, Aztec, and Inca, and the social contexts of writing during the colonial period, to challenge western conceptualizations of art, writing and literacy. The final papers offer stimulating discussions of interactions between European and indigenous writing systems"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

In the aftermath of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico, Spanish friars and authorities partnered with indigenous rulers and savants to gather detailed information on Aztec history, religious beliefs, and culture. The pictorial books they created served the Spanish as aids to evangelization and governance, but their content came from the native intellectuals, painters, and writers who helped to create them. Examining the nine major surviving texts, preeminent Latin American art historian Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how indigenous artists and writers documented their ancestral culture. Analyzing the texts as one distinct corpus, Boone shows how they combined European and indigenous traditions of documentation and considers questions of motive, authorship, and audience. For Spanish authorities, she shows, the books revealed Aztec ideology and practice, while for the indigenous community, they preserved venerated ways of pictorial expression as well as rhetorical and linguistic features of ancient discourses. The first comparative analysis of these encyclopedias, Descendants of Aztec Pictography analyzes how the painted compilations embraced artistic traditions from both sides of the Atlantic.