Mimbres Painted Pottery [Cloth Edition] [SOLD]

MIMBRES PAINTED POTTERY 

by J. J. Brody

Hardback with slip cover, first edition 1977.  253 pages, illustrated in color and black-and-white.

Condition: book is in very good condition; slip cover shows wear

Mimbres Painted Pottery tells the story of prehistoric subsistence farmers who developed an art form startling in its sophistication.  J. J. Brody draws on evidence from archaeology, ethnology, and an examination of several thousand Mimbres paintings to reconstruct the history and significance of the art of the Mimbres people, who lived in small farming villages in what is now southwestern New Mexico from about 250 B.C. to about A.D. 1150.  He shows that Mimbres art, in its basic forms as well as in its emblems and motifs, played an integrative role for the Mimbres people by expressing their belief in the interrelationship of all things and the continuity between the living and the dead. Almost 200 color and black-and-white photographs, maps, and line drawings complement the text.

A Distinguished Scholar of Southwestern Native arts for over thirty years, J. J. Brody here returns to his early work on the Mimbres ceramic tradition, which established him as the leading authority on the arts of this ancient people. The Mimbres cultural florescence between about A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1140 remains one of the most visually astonishing and anthropologically intriguing questions in Southwest prehistory. In this revised edition, Dr. Brody incorporates the extensive fieldwork done on Mimbres sites since the original publication in 1977, updating his discussion of village life, the larger world in which the Mimbres people lived, and how the art that they practiced illuminates these wider issues. He addresses human and animal iconography, the importance of perspective and motion in perceiving Mimbres artistry, and the technology used to produce the ceramics. Placing the study of ancient art and artifacts in the present, he notes the impact of the antiquities market on archaeological and artistic research.