Download or read book Iconographic Method in New World Prehistory written by Vernon J. Knight and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an overview of iconographic methods and their application to archaeological analysis. It offers a truly interdisciplinary approach that draws equally from art history and anthropology. Vernon James Knight, Jr., begins with a historigraphical overview, addressing the methodologies and theories that underpin both archaeology and art history. He then demonstrates how iconographic methods can be integrated with the scientific methods that are at the core of much archaeological inquiry. Focusing on artifacts from the pre-Columbian civilizations of North and Meso-American sites, Knight shows how the use of iconographic analysis yields new insights into these objects and civilizations.
Download or read book Iconographic Method in New World Prehistory written by Vernon James Knight and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an overview of iconographic methods and their application to archaeological analysis. It offers a truly interdisciplinary approach that draws equally from art history and anthropology. Vernon James Knight, Jr., begins with a historigraphical overview, addressing the methodologies and theories that underpin both archaeology and art history. He then demonstrates how iconographic methods can be integrated with the scientific methods that are at the core of much archaeological inquiry. Focusing on artifacts from the pre-Columbian civilizations of North and Meso-American sites, Knight shows how the use of iconographic analysis yields new insights into these objects and civilizations.
Download or read book New Methods and Theories for Analyzing Mississippian Imagery written by Bretton T. Giles and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, contributors show how stylistic and iconographic analyses of Mississippian imagery provide new perspectives on the beliefs, narratives, public ceremonies, ritual regimes, and expressions of power in the communities that created the artwork. Exploring various methodological and theoretical approaches to pre-Columbian visual culture, these essays reconstruct dynamic accounts of Native American history across the U.S. Southeast. These case studies offer innovative examples of how to use style to identify and compare artifacts, how symbols can be interpreted in the absence of writing, and how to situate and historicize Mississippian imagery. They examine designs carved into shell, copper, stone, and wood or incised into ceramic vessels, from spider iconography to owl effigies and depictions of the cosmos. They discuss how these symbols intersect with memory, myths, social hierarchies, religious traditions, and other spheres of Native American life in the past and present. The tools modeled in this volume will open new horizons for learning about the culture and worldviews of past peoples. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series Contributors: David Dye | Shawn P. Lambert | Bretton T. Giles | Vernon J. Knight, Jr. | Anna Semon | J. Grant Stauffer | Jesse Nowak | George E Lankford
Download or read book Explanations in Iconography written by Carol Diaz-Granados and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2023-10-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Case studies combine archaeological data and oral tradition to illustrate how the archaeological expression of beliefs and meanings passed down in the oral tradition may be interpreted. Explanations in Iconography: Ancient American Indian Art, Symbol, and Meaning is a significant contribution to the field of archaeology – a contribution in iconography studies that has gradually been coming into its own. Iconography is a rich and fascinating field, as applied to the complex, and heretofore enigmatic, imagery on many ancient Pre-Columbian artifacts. When viewed through the lens of early ethnographic records and American Indian oral traditions, as well as information from knowledgeable American Indian elders, it opens a world of understanding and clarity until recently unknown in the field of anthropological archaeology. It brings us closer to the people who created the artifacts and offers a glimpse into the symbols and beliefs that were important to them. Chapters cover a wide variety of artifacts and imagery from several ancient American Indian cultures. These artifacts include petroglyphs and pictographs (rock art), mounds, engraved shell cups and gorgets, burial architecture and grave furniture, pottery, copper repoussé, and other media. Ancient graphics, engravings, mounds, and all were created to deliver a message to the viewer – and many of those messages are finally coming to light. The artifacts included are from a variety of regions, mainly in the Midwest and Eastern United States. We hope that this volume will encourage others to look more deeply into the meaning behind the ancient imagery and arts and give the past a chance to be known.
Download or read book Iconography and Wetsite Archaeology of Florida s Watery Realms written by Ryan Wheeler and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with Frank Hamilton Cushing’s famous excavations at Key Marco in 1896, a large and diverse collection of animal carvings, dugout canoes, and other wooden objects has been uncovered from Florida’s watery landscapes. Iconography and Wetsite Archaeology of Florida’s Watery Realms explores new discoveries and reexamines existing artifacts to reveal the influential role of water in the daily lives of Florida’s early inhabitants. Contributors compare anthropomorphic wooden carvings such as the Key Marco cat statuette to figures found elsewhere in the Southeast, connecting Floridians with the Mississippian world. They use ethnographic data to argue that Newnans Lake was once an intersection between major watersheds and that the more than 100 canoes unearthed there likely facilitated travel throughout the peninsula. A second look at artifacts from the Fort Center pond reveals mortuary figurines were deposited intentionally and over the course of several centuries. Other sites discussed include Chassahowitzka Springs, Weedon Island Preserve, Pineland, and Hontoon Island. Essays address the challenges of excavating and preserving perishable artifacts from waterlogged sites, especially those in saltwater environments, highlight the value of revisiting museum collections to ask new questions and employ new analytical techniques, and emphasize the important role of the public in the discovery of wetland sites. This volume demonstrates that, despite the difficulties faced by archaeologists working with saturated deposits, these sites are vital for understanding Florida’s prehistory. Contributors: Ryan J. Wheeler | Joanna Ostapkowicz | Michael A. Arbuthnot | Merald R. Clark | Julia B. Duggins | Michael Faught | Vernon James Knight | Phyllis Kolianos | William H. Marquardt | Lee A. Newsom | Daniel M. Seinfeld | S. Margaret Spivey-Faulkner | Karen Walker A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines written by Timothy Insoll and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-13 with total page 961 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figurines dating from prehistory have been found across the world but have never before been considered globally. The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines is the first book to offer a comparative survey of this kind, bringing together approaches from across the landscape of contemporary research into a definitive resource in the field. The volume is comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible, with dedicated and fully illustrated chapters covering figurines from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia and the Pacific laid out by geographical location and written by the foremost scholars in figurine studies; wherever prehistoric figurines are found they have been expertly described and examined in relation to their subject matter, form, function, context, chronology, meaning, and interpretation. Specific themes that are discussed by contributors include, for example, theories of figurine interpretation, meaning in processes and contexts of figurine production, use, destruction and disposal, and the cognitive and social implications of representation. Chronologically, the coverage ranges from the Middle Palaeolithic through to areas and periods where an absence of historical sources renders figurines 'prehistoric' even though they might have been produced in the mid-2nd millennium AD, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a synthesis of invaluable insights into past thinking on the human body, gender, identity, and how the figurines might have been used, either practically, ritually, or even playfully.
Download or read book Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica written by Rubén G. Mendoza and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ceramics of Ancient America written by Yumi Park Huntington and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-09-12 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first volume to bring together archaeology, anthropology, and art history in the analysis of pre-Columbian pottery. While previous research on ceramic artifacts has been divided by these three disciplines, this volume shows how integrating these approaches provides new understandings of many different aspects of Ancient American societies. Contributors from a variety of backgrounds in these fields explore what ceramics can reveal about ancient social dynamics, trade, ritual, politics, innovation, iconography, and regional styles. Essays identify supernatural and humanistic beliefs through formal analysis of Lower Mississippi Valley "Great Serpent" effigy vessels and Ecuadorian depictions of the human figure. They discuss the cultural identity conveyed by imagery such as Andean head motifs, and they analyze symmetry in designs from locations including the American Southwest. Chapters also take diachronic approaches—methods that track change over time—to ceramics from Mexico’s Tarascan State and the Valley of Oaxaca, as well as from Maya and Toltec societies. This volume provides a much-needed multidisciplinary synthesis of current scholarship on Ancient American ceramics. It is a model of how different research perspectives can together illuminate the relationship between these material artifacts and their broader human culture. Contributors: | Dean Arnold | George J. Bey III | Michael Carrasco | David Dye | James Farmer | Gary Feinman | Amy Hirshman | Yumi Park Huntington | Johanna Minich | Shelia Pozorski and Thomas Pozorski | Jeff Price | Sarahh Scher | Dorothy Washburn | Robert F. Wald
Download or read book The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology written by Robbie Ethridge and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume uses case studies to capture the recent emphasis on history in archaeological reconstructions of America’s deep past. Previously, archaeologists studying “prehistoric” America focused on long-term evolutionary change, imagining ancient societies like living organisms slowly adapting to environmental challenges. Contributors to this volume demonstrate how today’s researchers are incorporating a new awareness that the precolonial era was also shaped by people responding to historical trends and forces. Essays in this volume delve into sites across what is now the United States Southeast—the St. Johns River Valley, the Gulf Coast, Greater Cahokia, Fort Ancient, the southern Appalachians, and the Savannah River Valley. Prominent scholars of the region highlight the complex interplay of events, human decision-making, movements, and structural elements that combined to shape native societies. The research in this volume represents a profound shift in thinking about precolonial and colonial history and begins to erase the false divide between ancient and contemporary America. Contributors: Susan M. Alt | Robin Beck | Eric E. Bowne | Robert A. Cook | Robbie Ethridge | Jon Bernard Marcoux | Timothy R. Pauketat | Thomas J. Pluckhahn | Asa R. Randall | Christopher B. Rodning | Kenneth E. Sassaman | Lynne P. Sullivan | Victor D. Thompson | Neill J. Wallis | John E. Worth A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
Download or read book Archaeologies of Cosmoscapes in the Americas written by J. Grant Stauffer and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2022-09-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines how pre-Columbian societies in the Americas envisioned their cosmos and iteratively modeled it through the creation of particular objects and places. It emphasizes that American societies did this to materialize overarching models and templates for the shape and scope of the cosmos, the working definition of cosmoscape. Noting a tendency to gloss over the ways in which ancestral Americans envisioned the cosmos as intertwined and animated, the authors examine how cosmoscapes are manifested archaeologically, in the forms of objects and physically altered landscapes. This book’s chapters, therefore, offer case studies of cosmoscapes that present themselves as forms of architecture, portable artifacts, and transformed aspects of the natural world. In doing so, it emphasizes that the creation of cosmoscapes offered a means of reconciling peoples experiences of the world with their understandings of them.
Download or read book Picture Worlds written by David Saunders and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This abundantly illustrated volume is the first to explore the painted pottery of the ancient Greek, Moche, and Maya cultures side by side. Satyrs and sphinxes, violent legumes, and a dancing maize deity figure in the stories painted on the pottery produced by the ancient Greek, Moche, and Maya cultures, respectively. Picture Worlds is the first book to examine the elaborately decorated terracotta vessels of these three distinct civilizations. Although the cultures were separated by space and time, they all employed pottery as a way to tell stories, explain the world, and illustrate core myths and beliefs. Each of these painted pots is a picture world. But why did these communities reach for pottery as a primary method of visual communication? How were the vessels produced and used? In this book, experts offer introductions to the civilizations, exploring these foundational questions and examining the painted imagery. Readers will be rewarded with a better understanding of each of these ancient societies, fascinating insights into their cultural commonalities and differences, and fresh perspectives on image making and storytelling, practices that remain vibrant to this day.
Download or read book Bodies of Maize Eaters of Grain Comparing material worlds metaphor and the agency of art in the Preclassic Maya and Mycenaean early civilisations written by Marcus Jan Bajema and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-09-30 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comparative study of the civilisations of the Late Preclassic lowland Maya and Mycenaean Greece. The approach used here seeks to combine traditional iconographic approaches with more recent models on metaphor and the social agency of things.
Download or read book Image Encounters written by Lisa Trever and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moche murals of northern Peru represent one of the great, yet still largely unknown, artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Created in an era without written scripts, these murals are key to understandings of Moche history, society, and culture. In this first comprehensive study on the subject, Lisa Trever develops an interdisciplinary methodology of “archaeo art history” to examine how ancient histories of art can be written without texts, boldly inverting the typical relationship of art to archaeology. Trever argues that early coastal artistic traditions cannot be reduced uncritically to interpretations based in much later Inca histories of the Andean highlands. Instead, the author seeks the origins of Moche mural art, and its emphasis on figuration, in the deep past of the Pacific coast of South America. Image Encounters shows how formal transformations in Moche mural art, before and after the seventh century, were part of broader changes to the work that images were made to perform at Huacas de Moche, El Brujo, Pañamarca, and elsewhere in an increasingly complex social and political world. In doing so, this book reveals alternative evidentiary foundations for histories of art and visual experience.
Download or read book The Art of Anthropology the Anthropology of Art written by Brandon D. Lundy and published by Southern Anthropological Socie. This book was released on 2013 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society, Richmond, Virginia, March, 2011"--t.p.
Download or read book Human Iconography and Symbolic Meaning in Near Eastern Prehistory written by Jörg Becker and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human iconography in Near Eastern prehistory has so far only examined specific themes. Iconographic research has mainly focused on aspects of fertility cults and images of the divine, both of which are strongly correlated with the beginning of sedentism in the Early Neolithic. Fieldwork over the last 30 years in South-west Asia has significantly expanded the spectrum of prehistoric anthropomorphic representations. This not only requires a re-evaluation of hitherto standard interpretation models, but also new approaches towards research on themes such as self-perception and self-expression of the human. The contributions in this volume will present a new and comprehensive understanding of prehistoric anthropomorphic iconography which will supplement the conventional thematic canon that is usually applied to the analyses of anthropomorphic representations. The contributions include detailed considerations of contexts containing anthropogenic images, burial practices, and anthropological data regarding health and nutrition. The chronological focus of the volume is the period from the late Epipalaeolithic (Natufian) to the Chalcolithic (c. 14,900 to 5700 cal.BP) covering the 'fertile crescent' region of South-west Asia. This period and region provide the broad context of the development of agriculture and animal husbandry as well as further essential foundations for social coexistence, all of which profoundly influence our modern society. The chapters show that the human iconography provides evidence for social hierarchies and complex gender relations from prehistory on. Further, they show early tendencies towards a canonisation of the principles of presentation in gestures. Magic-religious practices become visible, and the basic question regarding whether human beings or supernatural creatures are depicted is discussed in several contributions, although the meaning of their symbolic contents remains to be deciphered by future research.
Download or read book Archaeological Thought in America written by C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American archaeology today encompasses a huge range of approaches and draws eclectically on a multitude of academic disciplines. Until now, however, there has been no book seeking to separate the main strands and traditions of research and present a rounded picture of American archaeological thought in all its diversity. The seventeen essays in Archaeological Thought in America describe recent theoretical advances and present substantive interpretations of prehistoric data drawn from a variety of cultures and time-frames, including Mesoamerica, Central Asia, India and China. The contributors include many of the leading North American archaeologists of this generation.
Download or read book New World Archaeology and Culture History written by Gordon Randolph Willey and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
