Download or read book Moche Tombs at Dos Cabezas written by Christopher B. Donnan and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2007-12-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moche civilization flourished on the north coast of Peru between approximately AD 100 and 800. Although the Moche had no writing system, they left a vivid artistic record of their beliefs and activities in beautifully modeled and painted ceramic vessels, remarkable objects of gold, silver, and copper, sumptuous textiles, and carved and inlaid bone, wood, and stone. Tens of thousands of these objects can be seen today in museums and private collections throughout the world. Unfortunately, nearly all of them have been looted from Moche tombs by grave robbers, and thus there is no record of the grave, or the archaeological site, or even the valley from which they came. This lack of information severely limits what could have been learned about the Moche if the graves had been excavated archaeologically and their contents systematically recorded. This study focuses on five extraordinary Moche tombs that were archaeologically excavated at the site of Dos Cabezas. The tombs are remarkable not only for the wealth of objects they contained but also because we know how the tombs were constructed, how they relate to one another both spatially and temporally, and what individuals they contained. The tombs provide an unusual opportunity to understand aspects of Moche funerary practice that are lost when tombs are looted, and to appreciate the extraordinary artistic and technological sophistication of this ancient Peruvian civilization.
Download or read book The Art and Archaeology of the Moche written by Steve Bourget and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-06-03 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned for their monumental architecture and rich visual culture, the Moche inhabited the north coast of Peru during the Early Intermediate Period (AD 100-800). Archaeological discoveries over the past century and the dissemination of Moche artifacts to museums around the world have given rise to a widespread and continually increasing fascination with this complex culture, which expressed its beliefs about the human and supernatural worlds through finely crafted ceramic and metal objects of striking realism and visual sophistication. In this standard-setting work, an international, multidisciplinary team of scholars who are at the forefront of Moche research present a state-of-the-art overview of Moche culture. The contributors address various issues of Moche society, religion, and material culture based on multiple lines of evidence and methodologies, including iconographic studies, archaeological investigations, and forensic analyses. Some of the articles present the results of long-term studies of major issues in Moche iconography, while others focus on more specifically defined topics such as site studies, the influence of El Niño/Southern Oscillation on Moche society, the nature of Moche warfare and sacrifice, and the role of Moche visual culture in decoding social and political frameworks.
Download or read book La Mina written by Christopher B. Donnan and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La Mina: A Royal Moche Tomb focuses on La Mina, an extraordinarily rich tomb that was looted on the north coast of Peru in 1987. The ceramic and metal objects it contained were among the most extraordinary ever produced in the Andean area, and it had the most colorfully decorated pre-Columbian burial chamber ever found in the Americas. The artifacts are now scattered throughout the world, nearly all of them held in private collections. In this work Donnan reveals how he was able to locate and document many of the tomb's contents and determine how the tomb was constructed and embellished. With more than two hundred color images of the archaeological treasures unearthed at La Mina--remarkable works in ceramic and metal that are among the greatest masterpieces of art from the ancient world--students and scholars will welcome the mystery of how careful archaeological sleuthing can piece together valuable information to recover what seemed to be unrecoverable.
Download or read book Ancient Civilizations written by Dr. Brian Fagan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on many avenues of inquiry: archaeological excavations, surveys, laboratory work, highly specialized scientific investigations, and on both historical and ethnohistorical records; Ancient Civilizations, 3/e provides a comprehensive and straightforward account of the world’s first civilizations and a brief summary of the way in which they were discovered.
Download or read book Andean Civilization written by Joyce Marcus and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2009-12-31 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together exciting new field data by more than two dozen Andean scholars who came together to honor their friend, colleague, and mentor. These new studies cover the enormous temporal span of Moseley's own work from the Preceramic era to the Tiwanaku and Moche states to the Inka empire. And, like Moseley's own studies -- from Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization to Chan Chan: The Desert City to Cerro Baul's brewery -- these new studies involve settlements from all over the Andes -- from the far northern highlands to the far southern coast. An invaluable addition to any Andeanist's library, the papers in this book demonstrate the enormous breadth and influence of Moseley's work and the vibrant range of exciting new work by his former students and collaborators in fieldwork.
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 Golden Kingdoms written by Joanne Pillsbury and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume accompanies a major international loan exhibition featuring more than three hundred works of art, many rarely or never before seen in the United States. It traces the development of gold working and other luxury arts in the Americas from antiquity until the arrival of Europeans in the early sixteenth century. Presenting spectacular works from recent excavations in Peru, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico, this exhibition focuses on specific places and times—crucibles of innovation—where artistic exchange, rivalry, and creativity led to the production of some of the greatest works of art known from the ancient Americas. The book and exhibition explore not only artistic practices but also the historical, cultural, social, and political conditions in which luxury arts were produced and circulated, alongside their religious meanings and ritual functions. Golden Kingdoms creates new understandings of ancient American art through a thematic exploration of indigenous ideas of value and luxury. Central to the book is the idea of the exchange of materials and ideas across regions and across time: works of great value would often be transported over long distances, or passed down over generations, in both cases attracting new audiences and inspiring new artists. The idea of exchange is at the intellectual heart of this volume, researched and written by twenty scholars based in the United States and Latin America.
Download or read book Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom written by Wolfram Grajetzki and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With detailed illustrations and archival images, Egyptologist Wolfram Grajetzki describes and compares the opulent tombs of eminent and royal women from the late Middle Kingdom, shedding new light on how the gendered and social identities of these women were viewed in the court and preserved in the grave.
Download or read book The Moche of Ancient Peru written by Jeffrey Quilter and published by Peabody Museum Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quilter utilizes the Peabody's collection as a means to investigate how the Moche used various media, particularly ceramics, to convey messages about their lives and beliefs. His presentation provides a critical examination and rethinking of many of the commonly held interpretations of Moche artifacts and their imagery. It also raises important questions about art production and its role in this and other ancient and modern cultures. --
Download or read book Living with the Dead in the Andes written by Izumi Shimada and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Andean idea of death differs markedly from the Western view. In the Central Andes, particularly the highlands, death is not conceptually separated from life, nor is it viewed as a permanent state. People, animals, and plants simply transition from a soft, juicy, dynamic life to drier, more lasting states, like dry corn husks or mummified ancestors. Death is seen as an extension of vitality. Living with the Dead in the Andes considers recent research by archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, ethnographers, and ethnohistorians whose work reveals the diversity and complexity of the dead-living interaction. The book’s contributors reap the salient results of this new research to illuminate various conceptions and treatments of the dead: “bad” and “good” dead, mummified and preserved, the body represented by art or effigies, and personhood in material and symbolic terms. Death does not end or erase the emotional bonds established in life, and a comprehensive understanding of death requires consideration of the corpse, the soul, and the mourners. Lingering sentiment and memory of the departed seems as universal as death itself, yet often it is economic, social, and political agendas that influence the interactions between the dead and the living. Nine chapters written by scholars from diverse countries and fields offer data-rich case studies and innovative methodologies and approaches. Chapters include discussions on the archaeology of memory, archaeothanatology (analysis of the transformation of the entire corpse and associated remains), a historical analysis of postmortem ritual activities, and ethnosemantic-iconographic analysis of the living-dead relationship. This insightful book focuses on the broader concerns of life and death.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Ancient South America written by Martin Giesso and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-03-12 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South America is a vast, relatively isolated, landmass that includes 12 independent countries and one region (Guyane Française) with diverse ethnic groups speaking hundreds of different languages and dialects, and extraordinary creativity. Indigenous people have occupied its different habitats while transforming the landscape and themselves, with extraordinary dedication and success. This dictionary opens a window to these peoples through many entries, in an integrated approach that allows to connect the multiple facets of indigenous life before 1492. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Ancient South America contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and the culture of ancient South America. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about ancient South America.
Download or read book Ancient South America written by Karen Olsen Bruhns and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient South America, 2nd edition is completely revised and updated to reflect archaeological discoveries and insights made in the past three decades. It features the full panorama of the South American past from the first inhabitants to the European invasions.
Download or read book Human Sacrifice and Value written by Sean O'Neill and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-26 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume was made possible by the Norwegian Research Council’s generous funding of the Human Sacrifice and Value project (FRIPROHUMSAM 275947). It explores concepts of human sacrifice. This volume explores concepts of human sacrifice, focusing on its value – or multiplicity of values – in relative cultural and temporal terms, whether sacrifice is expressed in actual killings, in ideas revolving around ritualized, sanctioned or sanctified violence or loss, or in transformed and (often sublimated) undertakings. Bridging a wide variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, it analyses a spectrum of sacrificial logics and actions, daring us to rethink the scholarship of sacrifice by considering the oft hidden, subliminal and even paradoxical values and motivations that underlie sacrificial acts. The chapters give needed attention to pivotal questions in studies of sacrifice and ritualized violence – such as how we might employ new approaches to the existing evidence or revise long-debated theories about what exactly ‘human sacrifice’ is or might be, or why human sacrifice seems to emerge so often and so easily in human social experience across time and in vastly different cultures and historical contexts. Thus, the volume will strike a chord with scholars of sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, religious studies, political science and economics –wherever interest is focused on critically rethinking questions of sacred and sanctified human violence, and the values that make it what it is.
Download or read book Ancient Alterity in the Andes written by George F. Lau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alterity has yet to see sustained treatment in archaeology due in great part to the fact that the archaeological record is not always equipped to inform on the subject. Like its kindred concepts, such as identity and ethnicity, alterity is difficult to observe also because it can be expressed at different times and scales, from the individual, family and village settings, to contexts such as nations and empires. It can also be said to 'reside' just as well in objects and individuals, as it may in a technique, action or performance. One requires a relevant, holistic data set and multiple line of evidence. Ancient Alterity in the Andes provides just that by focusing on the great achievements of the ancient Andes during the first millennium AD, centred on a Precolumbian culture, known as Recuay (AD 1-1700).
Download or read book War Spectacle and Politics in the Ancient Andes written by Elizabeth N. Arkush and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warfare in the pre-Columbian Andes took on many forms, from inter-village raids to campaigns of conquest. Andean societies also created spectacular performances and artwork alluding to war – acts of symbolism that worked as political rhetoric while drawing on ancient beliefs about supernatural beings, warriors, and the dead. In this book, Elizabeth Arkush disentangles Andean warfare from Andean war-related spectacle and offers insights into how both evolved over time. Synthesizing the rich archaeological record of fortifications, skeletal injury, and material evidence, she presents fresh visions of war and politics among the Moche, Chimú, Inca, and pre-Inca societies of the conflict-ridden Andean highlands. The changing configurations of Andean power and violence serve as case studies to illustrate a sophisticated general model of the different forms of warfare in pre-modern societies. Arkush's book makes the complex pre-history of Andean warfare accessible by providing a birds-eye view of its major patterns and contrasts.
Download or read book Ritual Violence in the Ancient Andes written by Haagen D. Klaus and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditions of sacrifice exist in almost every human culture and often embody a society’s most meaningful religious and symbolic acts. Ritual violence was particularly varied and enduring in the prehistoric South American Andes, where human lives, animals, and material objects were sacrificed in secular rites or as offerings to the divine. Spectacular discoveries of sacrificial sites containing the victims of violent rituals have drawn ever-increasing attention to ritual sacrifice within Andean archaeology. Responding to this interest, this volume provides the first regional overview of ritual killing on the pre-Hispanic north coast of Peru, where distinct forms and diverse trajectories of ritual violence developed during the final 1,800 years of prehistory. Presenting original research that blends empirical approaches, iconographic interpretations, and contextual analyses, the contributors address four linked themes—the historical development and regional variation of north coast sacrifice from the early first millennium AD to the European conquest; a continuum of ritual violence that spans people, animals, and objects; the broader ritual world of sacrifice, including rites both before and after violent offering; and the use of diverse scientific tools, archaeological information, and theoretical interpretations to study sacrifice. This research proposes a wide range of new questions that will shape the research agenda in the coming decades, while fostering a nuanced, scientific, and humanized approach to the archaeology of ritual violence that is applicable to archaeological contexts around the world.
Download or read book Ancient Complex Societies written by Jennifer C. Ross and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Complex Societies examines the archaeological evidence for the rise and functioning of politically and socially “complex” cultures in antiquity. Particular focus is given to civilizations exhibiting positions of leadership, social and administrative hierarchies, emerging and already developed complex religious systems, and economic differentiation. Case studies are drawn from around the globe, including Asia, the Mediterranean region, and the American continents. Using case studies from Africa, Polynesia, and North America, discussion is dedicated to identifying what “complex” means and when it should be applied to ancient systems. Each chapter attempts to not only explore the sociopolitical and economic elements of ancient civilizations, but to also present an overview of what life was like for the later population within each system, sometimes drilling down to individual people living their daily lives. Throughout the chapters, the authors address problems with the idea of complexity, the incomparability of cultures, and the inconsistency of archaeological and historical evidence in reconstructing ancient cultures.
