the New World. This book showcases the prestigious collection of the Davenport Museum of Art, among the largest and most important Mexican Colonial collections outside of Mexico City, revealing a two-hundred-yearlong panorama of Mexican Colonial culture from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Collateral and documentary photography, as well as Colonial frames, retablos, maps, and conservation photography, make this a stunning contribution to the history of art in the Americas.PAuthor Marcus B. Burke is Curator of Paintings and Drawings at the Hispanic Society in New York. He is a pre-eminent authority on Mexican Colonial art and has taught at Yale University. He contributed to the catalogue for the exhibition, Mexico: Thirty Centuries of Splendor, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has authored numerous books and articles on art from the Colonial period.  (less)

connections to Guatemala during the colonial period, offers travellers an experience different from most states in Mexico. Here they see Indians and Ladinos living side by side following centuries-old traditions, each with their own interpretation of Catholicism, and a symbolic language that distinguishes their culture and customs. This book documents a fast-disappearing tradition of iron crosses as house blessings as collected by the late Frans Blom, now located at Na Bolom, the Museum and Cultural Centre established in 1960 in San Cristobal de Las Casas. By extending her purview from this collection to the more than two hundred extant crosses of iron, wood, and cement that are still visible on roofs of San Cristobal, Guess presents a wealth of information that traces the tradition from its origins, identifies stylistic variations that occur among these roof crosses, and provides interpretations of the symbols that adorn them. In a series of walking tours the author guides readers through the streets of the old barrios where the crosses still can be viewed. Interviews with homeowners and ironworkers provide explanations as to the importance of these talismans to those who make them and those who use them to bless their homes.  (less)

ball games, and ritual scenes. The extraordinary earthenware figures illustrated have all been recovered from burial sites and shaft tombs. They represent a wide range of subjects -- warriors, chieftains, acrobats, shamans, musicians, ball players, festival couples, and bound prisoners -- in a variety of styles from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 800 that constitute the artistic canon of a region encompassing the modern states of Colima, Jalisco, and Nayarit.PThis distinctive artistic tradition is among the most aesthetically appealing and culturally informative of the ancient Americas. Yet until now the region has never been as thoroughly documented as other early Mesoamerican civilizations. The ancient cultures of this period were not isolated farming villages, as was long thought, but impressive chieftaincies with complex social organizations; art, architecture, ritual dance, and performance played an essential and dynamic role in the formation and integration of these multiethnic societies.PThis is the first publication to analyze fully the splendid accomplishments of the area. It includes an analysis of a recently discovered multichambered shaft tomb in Huitzilapa, west of Guadalajara, the first scientifically excavated tomb found complete with multiple human remains, mortuary vessels, large-scale earthenware figures, conch-shell trumpets, and other precious objects. Other essays, by a distinguished team of American andMexican archaeologists, art historians, and ethnohistorians, describe the discovery at Tenochtitlan of a major circular ceremonial center; shamanism and spirituality as reflected in funerary sculpture; the West Mexican ball game, an elaborate ritual associated with pan-Mesoamerican themes o@aüzáG®ÿ¾Û€  (less)

Mexico and the northern coast of Peru -- with other biological, archaeological, and geographic evidence to establish a considerable degree of contact between Mesoamerica and the Andean region in pre-Columbian times.pFocusing on the Zapotec of Mexico and the Moche of Peru, Eubanks begins by telling how she gathered the physical evidence for her study using positive casts from molds made from actual maize ears. The clay replicas depicted on pottery vessels created by ancient artists of these two cultures are precise facsimiles of the botanical specimens. By comparing measurements from the prehistoric models to living races of maize present in Latin America today, Eubanks identified the particular types of maize represented -- with compelling results.pEubanks argues that the presence of South American maize on Zapotec urns and of Mexican maize on Moche jars proves that contact existed between these two geographically distant cultures during the Mesoamerican Classic period (ca. A.D. 400-750). Furthermore, she says, the wide variety of races of maize identified on the Peruvian pottery indicates that the northern coast of Peru was a major center of commercial and cultural exchange that extended from Chile throughout northern South America into Central America and Mexico.pThe interdisciplinary nature of this study will make it valuable to botanists, geneticists, and agronomists, as well as archaeologists and anthropologists.  (less)