With a natural historian's keen eye...

Winner of the Levenson Prize sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies

Shortlisted for the 2009 ICAS Book Award

Silk and bamboo are easily ruined, But metal and stone are hard to destroy.

Placed on a high mountain

The writing] will be passed down without limit.

- from Stone Eulogy, Mount Tie

To look at the mountains is like gazing at a painting, and roaming in the mountains is like reading history.

- Chen Yuanlong (1652-1736), commentary on inscriptions in and near Longyin Cave, Guilin

In this fascinating and meticulously researched...

Considered by many scholars the finest extant Mexican codex and one of the most important original sources for the study of pre-Columbian religion, the Codex Borgia is a work of profound beauty, filled with strange and evocative images related to calendrical, cosmological, ritual, and divinatory matters. Generally similar to such Mixtec manuscripts as the Codex Nuttall, the Codex Borgia is thought to have its origin (ca. A.D. 1400) in the southern central highlands of Mexico, perhaps in Puebla or Oaxaca. It is most probably a religious document that once belonged to a...

Over many centuries, the prehistoric Fremont and Anasazi peoples of present-day Utah left an artistic record in which distinctive styles are readily identifiable. From the Uinta Mountains through the central canyonlands to the Virgin River, Utah's abundant prehistoric rock art offers glimpses of a lost world.

The Rock Art of Utah is a rich sample of the many varieties of rock art found in the state. Through nearly two hundred high-quality photographs and drawings from the Donald Scott Collection, all made during the 1920s and 1930s, rock art expert Polly Schaafsma provides a...

Writing from the perspective of an art historian, Jane P. Davidson traces the history of paleontology illustration from the 15th century to the present. She combines discussions of these images as works of representative art with assessments of the artists. The book covers depictions of fossils, restorations of plants and animals, and ecological restorations in painting, drawing, sculpture, and in display restorations such as dioramas. Although the main subject of the book is scientific illustration, it also delves into "popular" illustrations such as those found in children's textbooks,...

Museumswissenschaft, Museumsanalyse, Museumsgeschichte, Museumstheorien ... - neben Bezeichnungen wie Museologie und Museumskunde haben in den letzten Jahren Komposita Verwendung gefunden, die vor allem eines vor Augen fuhren: das zunehmende wissenschaftliche Interesse an Museen. Bis heute kehrt dabei das Argument stets wieder, dass die Institution mageblicher Schauplatz nationaler Identitatsbildung gewesen sei. Der Band ruckt hingegen das Museum als Produkt grenzuberschreitender Austausch- und Transferprozesse von circa 1750 bis 1940 in den Mittelpunkt.

The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture collects essays and lectures by Georges Bataille spanning 30 years of research in anthropology, comparative religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. These were neither idle nor idyllic years; the discovery of Lascaux in 1940 coincides with the bloodiest war in history -- with new machines of death, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. Bataille's reflections on the possible origins of humanity coincide with the intensified threat of its possible extinction.For Bataille, prehistory is universal history; it is the history of a human community prior to its...

Proceedings of the XV World Congress UISPP (Lisbon, 4-9 September 2006)

This book includes papers presented at the session (C80) entitled 'Pleistocene Palaeoart of the World'.

Changing Pictures aims to return to traditional interpretative notions regarding the meaning and significance of rock art to investigate if and why any information had been left behind to recover and rethink. During the last decades, there has...

Paris Monographs in American Archaeology 25

This study presents a motif classification, quantification, and regional comparisons for engraved rock art from the Maderas Volcano on Ometepe Island, Nicaragua. Maderas has the largest concentration of petroglyphs thus far reported in Central America. A formal analysis was conducted, which included construction of a typology for, then quantitative analysis of motifs found on over 700 boulders - only a portion of that known to exist on the island.