Download or read book Flora and Fauna Imagery in Precolumbian Cultures written by Jeanette F. Peterson and published by British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited. This book was released on 1983 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Flora and Fauna Imagery in Precolumbian Cultures written by Jeanette F. Peterson and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica written by Susan Milbrath and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica links Precolumbian animal imagery with scientific data related to animal morphology and behavior, providing in-depth studies of the symbolic importance of animals and birds in Postclassic period Mesoamerica. Representations of animal deities in Mesoamerica can be traced back at least to Middle Preclassic Olmec murals, stone carvings, and portable art such as lapidary work and ceramics. Throughout the history of Mesoamerica real animals were merged with fantastical creatures, creating zoological oddities not unlike medieval European bestiaries. According to Spanish chroniclers, the Aztec emperor was known to keep exotic animals in royal aviaries and zoos. The Postclassic period was characterized by an iconography that was shared from central Mexico to the Yucatan peninsula and south to Belize. In addition to highlighting the symbolic importance of nonhuman creatures in general, the volume focuses on the importance of the calendrical and astronomical symbolism associated with animals and birds. Inspired by and dedicated to the work of Mesoamerican scholar Cecelia Klein and featuring imagery from painted books, monumental sculpture, portable arts, and archaeological evidence from the field of zooarchaeology, Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica highlights the significance of the animal world in Postclassic and early colonial Mesoamerica. It will be important to students and scholars studying Mesoamerican art history, archaeology, ethnohistory, and zoology.
Download or read book Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how visual arts functioned in the indigenous pre- and post-conquest New World as vehicles of social, religious, and political identity.
Download or read book Precolumbian Flora and Fauna written by Jeanette Favrot Peterson and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Unseen Art written by Claudia Brittenham and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Unseen Art, Claudia Brittenham unravels one of the most puzzling phenomena in Mesoamerican art history: why many of the objects that we view in museums today were once so difficult to see. She examines the importance that ancient Mesoamerican people assigned to the process of making and enlivening the things we now call art, as well as Mesoamerican understandings of sight as an especially godlike and elite power, in order to trace a gradual evolution in the uses of secrecy and concealment, from a communal practice that fostered social memory to a tool of imperial power. Addressing some of the most charismatic of all Mesoamerican sculptures, such as Olmec buried offerings, Maya lintels, and carvings on the undersides of Aztec sculptures, Brittenham shows that the creation of unseen art has important implications both for understanding status in ancient Mesoamerica and for analyzing art in the present. Spanning nearly three thousand years of the Indigenous art of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize, Unseen Art connects the dots between vision, power, and inequality, providing a critical perspective on our own way of looking.
Download or read book Archaeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America written by Susan Toby Evans and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2001 with total page 1322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reference is devoted to the pre-Columbian archaeology of the Mesoamerican culture area, one of the six cradles of early civilization. It features in-depth articles on the major cultural areas of ancient Mexico and Central America; coverage of important sites, including the world-renowned discoveries as well as many lesser-known locations; articles on day-to-day life of ancient peoples in these regions; and several bandw regional and site maps and photographs. Entries are arranged alphabetically and cover introductory archaeological facts (flora, fauna, human growth and development, nonorganic resources), chronologies of various periods (Paleoindian, Archaic, Formative, Classic and Postclassic, and Colonial), cultural features, Maya, regional summaries, research methods and resources, ethnohistorical methods and sources, and scholars and research history. Edited by archaeologists Evans and Webster, both of whom are associated with Pennsylvania State University. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book Flora of the Codex Cruz Badianus written by Arthur O. Tucker and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1929, Charles Upson Clark (1875-1960), a history Professor at Columbia University carrying out bibliographic research on the early history of the Americas in the Vatican Library, came across a remarkable illustrated Latin manuscript entitled Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Little Book of Indian Medicinal Herbs) completed in 1552. The manuscript now known as the Codex Cruz-Badianus (CCB) contained 185 illustrations (phytomorphs) of plants with text that described their medicinal uses. This manuscript spread new light on botanical and medicinal knowledge of the indigenous peoples of Mexico known today as the Nahuas or Aztecs. It was to have major repercussions on our knowledge of Aztec culture and the history of New Spain in the 16th century. CCB was produced at the Colegio of Imperial de Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco established in 1536 to train sons of the Aztec nobility for the clergy. The authors were two indigenous faculty members, Martin (Martinus in Latin) de la Cruz and Juan Badiano (Juannes Badianus in Latin) whose Spanish names were conferred upon their baptism. Martin de la Cruz was the Colegio’s indigenous doctor who gave instruction in medicine and Juan Badiano, a Latin teacher and former student translated the book into Latin. The herbal dedicated to the Viceroy Francisco de Mendoza was sent to Spain as a gift to King Carlos I soon after its completion in 1552. The original ended up in the Vatican Library until 1990 when John Paul II returned it to Mexico. In 1931, the Mayanist scholar, William Gates, and the biologist Emily Walcott Emmart became aware of the manuscript and independently translated it to English. In 2009, Martin Clayton, Luigi Guerrini, and Alejandro de Avila identified plants of the CCB based on Emmart’s book and a 17th century copy found in the Windsor library. Of the 185 phytomophs, Gates identified 85 on the generic level, Emmart 9, and Clayton et al. 126. However most of these identifications disagree. In the present work, 183 of 185 phytomorphs are systematically re-evaluated and identified on the generic, as well as specific level, along with their botanical descriptions, previous identifications, putative identification, distribution, names, and uses.
Download or read book Palaces and Courtly Culture in Ancient Mesoamerica written by Julie Nehammer Knub and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2014-01-19 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects eight recent and innovative studies spanning the breadth of Mesoamerica, from the Early Classic metropolis of Teotihuacan, to Tenochtitlan, the Late Postclassic capital of the Aztec, and from the arid central Mexican highlands in the west to the humid Maya lowlands in the east.
Download or read book Flower Worlds written by Michael Mathiowetz and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recognition of Flower Worlds is one of the most significant breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous spirituality in the Americas.Flower Worldsis the first volume to bring together a diverse range of scholars to create an interdisciplinary understanding of floral realms that extend at least 2,500 years in the past.
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 2022-09-08 with total page 505 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 Landscape And Power In Ancient Mesoamerica written by Rex Koontz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early cities in the second millennium BC to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan on the eve of the Spanish conquest, Ancient Mesoamericans created landscapes full of meaning and power in the center of their urban spaces. The sixteenth century description of Tenochtitlan by Bernal Diaz del Castillo and the archaeological remnants of Teotihuacan attest to the power and centrality of these urban configurations in Ancient Mesoamerican history. In Landscape and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, Rex Koontz, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, and Annabeth Headrick explore the cultural logic that structured and generated these centers.Through case studies of specific urban spaces and their meanings, the authors examine the general principles by which the Ancient Mesoamericans created meaningful urban space. In a profoundly interdisciplinary exchange involving both archaeologists and art historians, this volume connects the symbolism of those landscapes, the performances that activated this symbolism, and the cultural poetics of these ensembles.
Download or read book Past Minds written by Luther H Martin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do historians understand the minds, motivations, intentions of historical agents? What might evolutionary and cognitive theorizing contribute to this work? What is the relation between natural and cultural history? Historians have been intrigued by such questions ever since publication in 1859 of Darwin's The Origin of Species, itself the historicization of biology. This interest reemerged in the latter part of the twentieth century among a number of biologists, philosophers and historians, reinforced by the new interdisciplinary finding of cognitive scientists about the universal capacities of and constraints upon human minds. The studies in this volume, primarily by historians of religion, continue this discussion by focusing on historical examples of ancient religions as well as on the theoretical promises and problems relevant to that study.
Download or read book Aztec Philosophy written by James Maffie and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Aztec Philosophy, James Maffie shows the Aztecs advanced a highly sophisticated and internally coherent systematic philosophy worthy of consideration alongside other philosophies from around the world. Bringing together the fields of comparative world philosophy and Mesoamerican studies, Maffie excavates the distinctly philosophical aspects of Aztec thought. Aztec Philosophy focuses on the ways Aztec metaphysics—the Aztecs’ understanding of the nature, structure and constitution of reality—underpinned Aztec thinking about wisdom, ethics, politics,\ and aesthetics, and served as a backdrop for Aztec religious practices as well as everyday activities such as weaving, farming, and warfare. Aztec metaphysicians conceived reality and cosmos as a grand, ongoing process of weaving—theirs was a world in motion. Drawing upon linguistic, ethnohistorical, archaeological, historical, and contemporary ethnographic evidence, Maffie argues that Aztec metaphysics maintained a processive, transformational, and non-hierarchical view of reality, time, and existence along with a pantheistic theology. Aztec Philosophy will be of great interest to Mesoamericanists, philosophers, religionists, folklorists, and Latin Americanists as well as students of indigenous philosophy, religion, and art of the Americas.
Download or read book Truth and Power in American Archaeology written by Alice Beck Kehoe and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2024-10 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Truth and Power in American Archaeology, archaeologist and ethnohistorian Alice Beck Kehoe presents her key writings where archaeological fieldwork, ethnohistorical analysis, postcolonial anthropology, and feminist analysis intersect to provide students and scholars of anthropology an overview of the methodological and ethical issues in Americanist archaeology in the last thirty years. Truth and Power in American Archaeology brings together Kehoe’s broad-ranging, influential articles and previously unpublished lectures to explore archaeology’s history, methods, concepts, and larger imbrication in knowledge production in the West. With her contextualizing introductions, these articles argue for recognition of scientific method in the historical sciences of archaeology, paleontology, and geology; empirically grounded understandings of American First Nations’ ways of life and scientific knowledge; discussion of archaeology as expanded histories; a view of American archaeology’s social contexts of Manifest Destiny ideology, Cold War politics, and patriarchy; and a postcolonial historicist understanding of America’s real deep-time history and of the imperialist racism entrenched in mainstream American archaeology.
Download or read book Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in World Art written by Hope B. Werness and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals and their symbolism in diverse world cultures and different eras of human history are chronicled in this lovely volume.
Download or read book Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate written by Elizabeth Hill Boone and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode. In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.
