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Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks
Joanne Pillsbury
Harvard University Press, 2012
Based on the comprehensive study of one of the most important collections of Maya art in the United States, Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks is a scholarly introduction to one of the great traditions of sculpture and painting in ancient America. Assembled by Robert Woods Bliss between 1935 and 1962, the collection is historically important, as it was one of the first to be established on the basis of aesthetic criteria. The catalogue, written by leading international scholars of Maya archaeology, art history, and writing, contains detailed analyses of specific works of art along with thematic essays situating these works within the broader context of Maya culture. Monumental panels, finely worked jade ornaments, exquisitely painted ceramic vessels, and other objects-most created in the first millennium ce-are presented in full color and analyzed in light of recent breakthroughs in understanding their creation, function, and deeper meaning in Maya ritual and history. Individual essays address the history of the Dumbarton Oaks collection; Maya culture, history, and myth; and Maya aesthetics. They also study specific materials (including jade, shell, and fine ceramics) and their meanings. Scholarly yet accessible, this volume provides a detailed introduction to Maya art and culture.
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The Art of Urbanism
How Mesoamerican Kingdoms Represented Themselves in Architecture and Imagery
William L. Fash
Harvard University Press, 2009

The Art of Urbanism explores how the royal courts of powerful Mesoamerican centers represented their kingdoms in architectural, iconographic, and cosmological terms. Through an investigation of the ecological contexts and environmental opportunities of urban centers, the contributors consider how ancient Mesoamerican cities defined themselves and reflected upon their physical—and metaphysical—place via their built environment. Themes in the volume include the ways in which a kingdom’s public monuments were fashioned to reflect geographic space, patron gods, and mythology, and how the Olmec, Maya, Mexica, Zapotecs, and others sought to center their world through architectural monuments and public art.

This collection of papers addresses how communities leveraged their environment and built upon their cultural and historical roots as well as the ways that the performance of calendrical rituals and other public events tied individuals and communities to both urban centers and hinterlands. Twenty-three scholars from archaeology, anthropology, art history, and religious studies contribute new data and new perspectives to the understanding of ancient Mesoamericans’ own view of their spectacular urban and ritual centers.

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The Copan Sculpture Museum
Ancient Maya Artistry in Stucco and Stone
Barbara W. Fash
Harvard University Press, 2011

The Copan Sculpture Museum in western Honduras features the extraordinary stone carvings of the ancient Maya city known as Copan. The city’s sculptors produced some of the finest and most animated buildings and temples in the Maya area, in addition to stunning monolithic statues and altars. The ruins of Copan were named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1980, and more than 150,000 national and international tourists visit the ancient city each year.

Opened in 1996, the Copan Sculpture Museum was initiated as an international collaboration to preserve Copan’s original stone monuments. Its exhibits represent the best-known examples of building façades and sculptural achievements from the ancient kingdom of Copan. The creation of this on-site museum involved people from all walks of life: archaeologists, artists, architects, and local craftspeople. Today it fosters cultural understanding and promotes Hondurans’ identity with the past.

In The Copan Sculpture Museum, Barbara Fash—one of the principle creators of the museum—tells the inside story of conceiving, designing, and building a local museum with global significance. Along with numerous illustrations and detailed archaeological context for each exhibit in the museum, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the history and culture of the ancient Maya and a model for working with local communities to preserve cultural heritage.

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Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3
Part 4: Yaxchilan
Barbara W. Fash
Harvard University Press

The goal of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions is to document in photographs and detailed line drawings all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art. As monuments continue to be discovered, the CMHI series is ongoing and far from complete. It has been instrumental in the remarkable success of the ongoing process of deciphering Maya writing, making available hundreds of texts to epigraphers working around the world, in addition to assisting studies among Maya communities and scholars.

This folio-sized volume documents thirty stelae at Yaxchilan, a Classic Maya city located on the Usumacinta River in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Precisely rendered line drawings and three-dimensional scans bring out details of the monuments that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. These illustrations are accompanied by descriptions of the stelae in English and Spanish.

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Past Presented
Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas
Joanne Pillsbury
Harvard University Press, 2012
Illustrations remain one of the fundamental tools of archaeology, a means by which we share information and build ideas. Often treated as if they were neutral representations, archaeological illustrations are the convergence of science and the imagination. This volume, a collection of fourteen essays addressing the visual presentation of the Pre-Columbian past from the fifteenth century to the present day, explores and contextualizes the visual culture of archaeological illustration, addressing the intellectual history of the field and the relationship of archaeological illustration to other scientific disciplines and the fine arts. One of the principal questions raised by this volume is how do archaeological illustrations, which organize complex sets of information, shape the construction of knowledge? These visual and conceptual constructions warrant closer scrutiny: they matter, they shape our thinking. Archaeological illustrations are a mediation of vision and ideas, and the chapters in this volume consider how visual languages are created and how they become institutionalized. Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas is about the ways in which representations illuminate the concerns and possibilities of a specific time and place and how these representations, in turn, shaped the field of archaeology.
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front cover of Precolumbian Water Management
Precolumbian Water Management
Ideology, Ritual, and Power
Edited by Lisa J. Lucero and Barbara W. Fash
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Among ancient Mesoamerican and Southwestern peoples, water was as essential as maize for sustenance and was a driving force in the development of complex society. Control of water shaped the political, economic, and religious landscape of the ancient Americas, yet it is often overlooked in Precolumbian studies. Now one volume offers the latest thinking on water systems and their place within the ancient physical and mental language of the region.

Precolumbian Water Management examines water management from both economic and symbolic perspectives. Water management facilities, settlement patterns, shrines, and water-related imagery associated with civic-ceremonial and residential architecture provide evidence that water systems pervade all aspects of ancient society. Through analysis of such data, the contributors seek to combine an understanding of imagery and the religious aspects of water with its functional components, thereby presenting a unified perspective of how water was conceived, used, and represented in ancient greater Mesoamerica. The collection boasts broad chronological and geographical coverage—from the irrigation networks of Teotihuacan to the use of ritual water technology at Casas Grandes—that shows how procurement and storage systems were adapted to local conditions.

The articles consider the mechanisms that were used to build upon the sacredness of water to enhance political authority through time and space and show that water was not merely an essential natural resource but an important spiritual one as well, and that its manipulation was socially far more complex than might appear at first glance. As these papers reveal, an understanding of materials associated with water can contribute much to the ways that archaeologists study ancient cultural systems. Precolumbian Water Management underscores the importance of water management research and the need to include it in archaeological projects of all types.
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Volume 10
Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos
Harvard University Press, 1975

The goal of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions is to document in photographs and detailed line drawings all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art. When complete, the Corpus will have published the inscriptions from over 200 sites and 2,000 monuments. The series has been instrumental in the remarkable success of the ongoing process of deciphering Maya writing, making available hundreds of texts to epigraphers working around the world.

This is the first of four volumes on the famous Pacific Coast site of Cotzumalhuapa, Escuintla, Guatemala. This fascicle describes the site and history of exploration at one of the major Late Classic cities of Mesoamerica, as well as the city’s interchange and cultural overlaps with the lowland Maya region. It includes coverage of twenty-one monuments from Bilbao, a major ceremonial compound with sculptures that serve as distinctive examples of the Cotzumalhuapa art style.

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Zuni, Hopi, Copan
Early Anthropology at Harvard, 1890–1893
Curtis M. Hinsley
Harvard University Press
Zuni, Hopi, Copan: Early Anthropology at Harvard, 1890–1893 publishes one hundred letters from John Gundy Owens to Deborah Harker Stratton, currently held in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Owens was one of the first graduate students in anthropology at Harvard; his poignant letters to “Miss Debbie” trace a budding relationship of affection in late Victorian America and offer vivid, highly entertaining accounts of his fieldwork at Zuni pueblo in New Mexico, Hopi mesa villages in Arizona, and the Maya site of Copan in Honduras. Tragically, Owens died at age twenty-seven in Copan; Stratton never married and kept the letters until her own death, nearly fifty years later. Introductory essays by Curtis M. Hinsley, Louis A. Hieb, and Barbara W. Fash contextualize the annotated letters and shed new light on early anthropological training in the United States.
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