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Pre-Columbian Art: Investigations and Insights
Hildegard Delgado Pang
Pre-Columbian Art: Investigations and Insights is Hildegard Delgado Pang's richly illustrated introduction to the art of ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes—the Maya, Aztec, Moche, Inca, and their many neighbors. Rather than a simple chronology of objects, the book is organized around what the art meant and how scholars have come to understand it, drawing on archaeology, iconography, ethnohistory, and more to read carved stelae, painted vessels, gold work, and textiles. Pang shows how Pre-Columbian artists legitimized rulers, recorded ritual, mapped the cosmos, and marked the passage from life to death, and she introduces the dynasties and named figures that decades of decipherment have brought to light. With a foreword by the eminent Mayanist Michael D. Coe, it's pitched to students and interested general readers alike. For anyone curious about the great civilizations of the ancient Americas and the art they left behind, it's a thoughtful and accessible guide.
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The author
Hildegard Delgado Pang was a scholar of Pre-Columbian art whose survey draws together evidence from many disciplines. The book carries a foreword by Michael D. Coe, one of the most influential twentieth-century scholars of the ancient Maya.
The book
Published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1992, Pre-Columbian Art: Investigations and Insights is a profusely illustrated introduction to the art of ancient Mesoamerica and Andean South America. It is organized thematically—how the art validated rulers, recorded ritual, and portrayed the cosmos—rather than as a bare catalog of styles.
How to read it
As an interpretive primer. Its strength is method: it shows not just what the objects are but how archaeologists and art historians have learned to read them.
For more context
Read alongside Coe's own The Maya and Mary Ellen Miller's surveys of ancient American art.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Hildegard Delgado Pang
- Publisher
- University of Oklahoma
- Place of publication
- Norman
- Year
- 1992
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine