Faking Ancient Mesoamerica

Faking Ancient Mesoamerica PDF Author: Nancy L Kelker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315428598
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Crystal skulls, imaginative codices, dubious Olmec heads and cute Colima dogs. Fakes and forgeries run rampant in the Mesoamerican art collections of international museums and private individuals. Authors Nancy Kelker and Karen Bruhns examine the phenomenon in this eye-opening volume. They discuss the most commonly forged classes and styles of artifacts, many of which were being duplicated as early as the 19th century. More important, they describe the system whereby these objects get made, purchased, authenticated, and placed in major museums as well as the complicity of forgers, dealers, curators, and collectors in this system. Unique to this volume are biographies of several of the forgers, who describe their craft and how they are able to effectively fool connoisseurs and specialists. An important, accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud for archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike. A parallel volume by the same authors discusses fakes in Andean archaeology.

Faking Ancient Mesoamerica

Faking Ancient Mesoamerica PDF Author: Nancy L Kelker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315428598
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
Crystal skulls, imaginative codices, dubious Olmec heads and cute Colima dogs. Fakes and forgeries run rampant in the Mesoamerican art collections of international museums and private individuals. Authors Nancy Kelker and Karen Bruhns examine the phenomenon in this eye-opening volume. They discuss the most commonly forged classes and styles of artifacts, many of which were being duplicated as early as the 19th century. More important, they describe the system whereby these objects get made, purchased, authenticated, and placed in major museums as well as the complicity of forgers, dealers, curators, and collectors in this system. Unique to this volume are biographies of several of the forgers, who describe their craft and how they are able to effectively fool connoisseurs and specialists. An important, accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud for archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike. A parallel volume by the same authors discusses fakes in Andean archaeology.

Faking Ancient Mesoamerica

Faking Ancient Mesoamerica PDF Author: Nancy L Kelker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315428601
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This is an important accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud of Central Americafor archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike.

Faking the Ancient Andes

Faking the Ancient Andes PDF Author: Karen O Bruhns
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315428555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Nasca pots, Quimbaya figurines, Moche porn figures, stone shamans. Fakes and forgeries run rampant in the Andean art collections of international museums and private individuals. Authors Karen Bruhns and Nancy Kelker examine the phenomenon in this eye-opening volume. They discuss the most commonly forged classes and styles of artifacts, many of which were being duplicated as early as the 19th century. More important, they describe the system whereby these objects get made, purchased, authenticated, and placed in major museums as well as the complicity of forgers, dealers, curators, and collectors in this system. Unique to this volume are biographies of several of the forgers, who describe their craft and how they are able to effectively fool connoisseurs and specialists. This is an important accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud for archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike. A parallel volume by the same authors discusses fakes in Mesoamerican archaeology.

Women in Ancient America

Women in Ancient America PDF Author: Karen Olsen Bruhns
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806147520
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This new edition of Women in Ancient America draws on recent advances in the archaeology of gender to reexamine the activities, roles, and relationships of women in the prehistoric Native societies of North, Central, and South America. Women—and women’s work—have been crucial to the survival and success of American peoples since ancient times. And as hunting and foraging societies developed farming techniques and eventually created permanent settlements, women’s roles changed. Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen E. Stothert consider the various economic adaptations that followed, as well as the ways in which women participated in food production and the specialized industries of their societies. They also look at women’s access to power, both political and religious, paying particular attention to the place of priestesses and goddesses in the spiritual life of ancient peoples. The narrative that unfolds in Women in Ancient America is based on the most recent research, using evidence and examples from a wide range of cultures dating from the Paleoindian period to European invasion. This book, unlike others, treats many different types of societies, as the authors develop arguments sure to provoke thinking about the lives of women who inhabited the Americas in the distant past.

Figurines

Figurines PDF Author: Jaś Elsner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192605283
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Figurines are objects of handling. As touchable objects, they engage the viewer in different ways from flat art, whether relief sculpture or painting. Unlike the voyeuristic relationship of viewing a neatly framed pictorial narrative as if from the outside, the viewer as handler is always potentially and without protection within the narrative of figurines. As such, they have potential for a potent, even animated, agency in relation to those who use them. This volume concerns figurines as archaeologically-attested materials from literate cultures with surviving documents that have no direct links of contiguity, appropriation, or influence in relation to each other. It is an attempt to put the category of the figurine on the table as a key conceptual and material problematic in the art history of antiquity. It does so through comparative juxtaposition of close-focused chapters drawn from deep art-historical engagement with specific ancient cultures - Chinese, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican, and Greco-Roman. It encourages comparative conversation across the disciplines that constitute the art history of the ancient world through finding categories and models of discourse that may offer fertile ground for comparison and antithesis. It extends the rich and astute literature on prehistoric figurines into understanding the figurine in historical contexts, where literary texts and documents, inscriptions, or surviving terminologies can be adduced alongside material culture. At stake are issues of figuration and anthropomorphism, miniaturization and portability, one-off production and replication, and substitution and scale at the interface of archaeology and art history.

The Market for Mesoamerica

The Market for Mesoamerica PDF Author: Cara G. Tremain
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813057205
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Pre-Columbian artifacts are among the most popular items on the international antiquities market, yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to monitor these items as public, private, and digital sales proliferate. This timely volume explores past, current, and future policies and trends concerning the sales and illicit movement of artifacts from Mesoamerica to museums and private collections. Informed by the fields of anthropology, economics, law, and criminology, contributors critically analyze practices of research and collecting in Central American countries. They assess the circulation of looted and forged artifacts on the art market and in museums and examine government and institutional policies aimed at fighting trafficking. They also ask if and how scholars can use materials removed from their context to interpret the past. The theft of cultural heritage items from their places of origin is a topic of intense contemporary discussion, and The Market for Mesoamerica updates our knowledge of this issue by presenting undocumented and illicit antiquities within a regional and global context. Through discussion of transparency, accountability, and ethical practice, this volume ultimately considers how antiquities can be protected and studied through effective policy and professional practice. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art

Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art PDF Author: Brian A. Brown
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614510350
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 842

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Book Description
This volume assembles more than 30 articles focusing on the visual, material, and environmental arts of the Ancient Near East. Specific case studies range temporally from the fourth millennium up to the Hellenistic period and geographically from Iran to the eastern Mediterranean. Contributions apply innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to archaeological evidence and critically examine the historiography of the discipline itself. Not intended to be comprehensive, the volume instead captures a cross-section of the field of Ancient Near Eastern art history as its stands in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The volume will be of value to scholars working in the Ancient Near East as well as others interested in newer art historical and anthropological approaches to visual culture.

A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East

A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East PDF Author: D. T. Potts
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444360779
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1509

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Book Description
A COMPANION TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East is a comprehensive and authoritative overview of ancient material culture from the late Pleistocene to Late Antiquity. This expansive two-volume work includes 58 new essays from an international community of ancient Near East scholars. With coverage extending from Asia Minor, the eastern Mediterranean, and Egypt to the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Indo-Iranian borderlands, the book highlights the enormous variation in cultural developments across roughly 11,000 years of human endeavor. In addition to chapters devoted to specific regions and particular periods, many contributors concentrate on individual industries and major themes in ancient Near Eastern archaeology, ranging from metallurgy and agriculture to irrigation and fishing. Controversial issues, including the nature and significance of the antiquities market, ethical considerations in archaeological praxis, the history of the foundation of departments of antiquities, and ancient attitudes towards the past, make this a unique collection of studies that will be of interest to scholars, students, and interested readers alike.

Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of Art Crime

Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of Art Crime PDF Author: Duncan Chappell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317160576
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In the world of law enforcement art and antiquity crime has in the past usually assumed a place of low interest and priority. That situation has now slowly begun to change on both the local and international level as criminals, encouraged in part by the record sums now being paid for art treasures, are now seeking to exploit the art market more systematically by means of theft, fraud and looting. In this collection academics and practitioners from Australasia, Europe and North America combine to examine the challenges presented to the criminal justice system by these developments. Best practice methods of detecting, investigating, prosecuting and preventing such crimes are explored. This book will be of interest and use to academics and practitioners alike in the areas of law, crime and justice.

Unseen Art

Unseen Art PDF Author: Claudia Brittenham
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477325972
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
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.