Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica

Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica

Author: Susan Milbrath

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1646424611

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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.


Exhibiting Animals in Europe and America

Exhibiting Animals in Europe and America

Author: M. Elizabeth Boone

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-29

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1040222463

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This edited volume, written by historians of art and visual culture who are working in the field of animal studies, seeks to understand how our ways of positioning (and ex-positioning) animals have separated us from the other-than-human animals that are an integral part of our interconnected world. Bringing together the visual and material culture of display with recent theoretical study on human–animal relations, the book draws attention to ways in which we might rethink this history and map pathways for the future. Defining the idea of exhibition and display broadly, chapters consider a diverse range of media, including paintings, anatomical sculpture, books, prints, and clothing; exhibition venues that take place in both the public and private realms; and key ideas such as looking at/looking back, seeing/being seen, and interspecies recognition. The authors cover topics that span the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries and focus geographically on Europe and America, with significant content related to Canada, Indigenous America, and Latin America. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, museum studies, animal studies, and environmental humanities.


Journeys to the United Mexican States

Journeys to the United Mexican States

Author: Kalman Dubov

Publisher: Kalman Dubov

Published: 2022-06-22

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13:

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Mexico's history reaches back 4,000 years, beginning with the Olmecs who lived in the Yucatan Peninsula. That remarkable civilization created those huge stone heads with developments that spearheaded and vitalized every subsequent Mesoamerican civilization that followed. The Olmecs, and the Maya, who succeeded them, created the concept of zero, an incredible development in mathematical computation. This book begins with the Olmecs, tracing successor civilizations to the last Mesoamerican Empire, the Aztecs. I describe Aztec life, ritual, cuisine, and development until, in August 1521, this civilization was conquered by Spanish conquistadors. Much of the Aztecs, their people, and royalty are known today by way of Spanish ethnographers and historians who authored codices writing and describing what they saw even as that civilization was changed. That change was permanent. Aztec ritual and its polytheism were altered by Spanish missionaries and enforced by the Inquisition. From 1521 until 1821, Spanish Colonial authorities imposed forced labor in varying forms. Colonialism was overthrown in 1821, and Mexico now entered a new era. This book describes those changes as well as the challenges the government today faces in addressing many disparities in its policies. Healthcare challenges, with systemic poverty as well as the drug war preoccupies much energy in the government's efforts to address them. Mexico also has a large Jewish population whose history was marked by secrecy and Spanish efforts to eradicate this ancient religion. Today's Zocalo, in the heart of Centro Historico, was the place where Jews were burned to death in public admonition against Jewish practice. Another site for such death was the nearby ex-Convento of San Diego, opposite the Grand Palace de Belles Artes. Today's Jews are thriving, and Mexico-Israel relations are strong. This book would not be complete without describing my visits to the country. In My Visit, I describe the different ports I visited while aboard cruise ships. But many more months in the country were spent in San Miguel de Allende and in Mexico City. I describe these visits, their people, and the many nuances of Mexican life. The Mexican constitution recognizes 69 ethnic languages and speakers who are scattered but who primarily live in its southern states. Many ethnic languages are so diverse, that their dialects are unintelligible to the same language group. Language creates the core bonds of society and such multiplicity provides insight into the huge diversity of identity and of life in Mexico. This book is the 14th in the Journey series and is my first book on the American continent. I hope I have done justice to the vast complexity of this society.


A Rosetta Key for U.S. History

A Rosetta Key for U.S. History

Author: Michael A. Susko

Publisher: AllrOneofUs Publishing

Published: 2023-12-21

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13:

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This work explores a generational history from America's Colonial period to the United States of contemporary times. A novel historical approach will rely on generational markers every 15th year, rather than yearly astronomical dates. This method will make history more accessible and its patterns more apparent. Identified from cultures presented in an earlier volume, the phasings are: 1) "Invisible" Beginnings; 2) Establishment and Testing; 3) Novel Consolidation and Opening Up, 4) Crisis and Creativity; 5) Empire and Inclusion, and 6) Rigidification or Renewal. This history does not seek to hide or obscure the shadow side of America, nor does it fail to present beauty and light, especially during the 30s generational phase. One discovery prompted by this generational time chart was to more fully consider the importance of New Spain in understanding U.S. history. A second and related theme is inclusion of the Indigenous, whose influence extends to all phases of American history. Come journey with us and experience historical events and people's lives generation by generation, and see how they fit into historical phases. Such an awareness, the author contends, will help us to make the generational choice of our times.


Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America

Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America

Author: Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2023-05-09

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1683403789

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Rethinking the role of the artist and recovering the work of unacknowledged creators in colonial society This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries. Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting. Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it. Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.


Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century

Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century

Author: Wendy Bellion

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-01-26

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1350259055

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Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period.


Eternal Sovereigns

Eternal Sovereigns

Author: Gloria Jane Bell

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2024-09-06

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1478059842

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In 1925, Pius XI staged the Vatican Missionary Exposition in Rome’s Vatican City. Offering a narrative of the Catholic Church’s beneficence to a global congregation, the exposition displayed thousands of cultural belongings stolen from Indigenous communities across Turtle Island, which were seen by one million pilgrims. Gloria Bell’s Eternal Sovereigns offers critical revision to that story. Bell reveals the tenacity, mobility, and reception of Indigenous artists, travelers, and activists in 1920s Rome. Animating these conjunctures, the book foregrounds competing claims to sovereignty from Indigenous and papal perspectives. Bell deftly juxtaposes the “Indian Museum” of nineteenth-century sculptor Ferdinand Pettrich with the oeuvre of Indigenous artist Edmonia Lewis. Bell analyzes Indigenous cultural belongings made by artists from diverse nations including Cree, Lakota, Anishinaabe, Nipissing, Kanien’kehá:ka, Wolastoqiyik, and Kwakwaka’wakw. Drawing on years of archival research and field interviews, Bell provides insight into the Catholic Church’s colonial collecting and its ongoing ethnological display practices. Written in a voice that questions the academy’s staid conventions, the book reclaims Indigenous belongings and other stolen treasures that remain imprisoned in the stronghold of the Vatican Museums.