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"Olmec art."
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Reconsidering Olmec visual culture : the unborn, women, and creation
This groundbreaking study of gestational imagery on ancient Olmec monuments and objects brings to light Mesoamerica’s earliest creation narrative and traces its evolution into one of the enduring themes of Mesoamerican ritual life and art.
eBook
Unseen Art
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.
eBook
Escultura olmeca de San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán
La civilización olmeca nació y prosperó en la costa sur del Golfo de México. La primera capital de este pueblo fue San Lorenzo, Veracruz, la cual ejercía un dominio entre 1400 y 1000 a.C. bajo el mando de gobernantes hereditarios quienes ocupaban el ápice del sistema político y social y contaban con el respaldo de la ideología. Esta ideología se plasmó en magníficas esculturas de piedra como, por ejemplo, las cabezas colosales, los inmensos tronos y las figuras humanas, entre otras obras.En esta obra se proporciona un registro actualizado de 165 esculturas de esta gran capital y de cuatro centros menores en su sistema de asentamientos: Loma del Zapote, Estero Rabón, Tenochtitlán y El Remolino. Estas obras escultóricas guardan información sobre las raíces más remotas de esta cultura, los mensajes que los gobernantes y sacerdotes querían transmitir, los cambios ideológicos a lo largo de su desarrollo cultural y las jerarquías en el patrón de asentamiento.
eBook
Sculpture and Social Dynamics in Preclassic Mesoamerica
This book examines the functions of sculpture during the Preclassic period in Mesoamerica and its significance in statements of social identity. Julia Guernsey situates the origins and evolution of monumental stone sculpture within a broader social and political context and demonstrates the role that such sculpture played in creating and institutionalizing social hierarchies. This book focuses specifically on an enigmatic type of public, monumental sculpture known as the 'potbelly' that traces its antecedents to earlier, small domestic ritual objects and ceramic figurines. The cessation of domestic rituals involving ceramic figurines along the Pacific slope coincided not only with the creation of the first monumental potbelly sculptures, but with the rise of the first state-level societies in Mesoamerica by the advent of the Late Preclassic period. The potbellies became central to the physical representation of new forms of social identity and expressions of political authority during this time of dramatic change.
eBook
Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture
Recently, scholars of Olmec visual culture have identified symbols for umbilical cords, bundles, and cave-wombs, as well as a significant number of women portrayed on monuments and as figurines. In this groundbreaking study, Carolyn Tate demonstrates that these subjects were part of a major emphasis on gestational imagery in Formative Period Mesoamerica. InReconsidering Olmec Visual Culture, she identifies the presence of women, human embryos, and fetuses in monuments and portable objects dating from 1400 to 400 BC and originating throughout much of Mesoamerica. This highly original study sheds new light on the prominent roles that women and gestational beings played in Early Formative societies, revealing female shamanic practices, the generative concepts that motivated caching and bundling, and the expression of feminine knowledge in the 260-day cycle and related divinatory and ritual activities.
Reconsidering Olmec Visual Cultureis the first study that situates the unique hollow babies of Formative Mesoamerica within the context of prominent females and the prevalent imagery of gestation and birth. It is also the first major art historical study of La Venta and the first to identify Mesoamerica's earliest creation narrative. It provides a more nuanced understanding of how later societies, including Teotihuacan and West Mexico, as well as the Maya, either rejected certain Formative Period visual forms, rituals, social roles, and concepts or adopted and transformed them into the enduring themes of Mesoamerican symbol systems.
eBook
