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  • Constructing Power and Place in Mesoamerica: Pre-Hispanic Paintings from Three Regions ed. by Merideth Paxton and Leticia Staines Cicero
  • Virginia E. Miller
Constructing Power and Place in Mesoamerica: Pre-Hispanic Paintings from Three Regions. Edited by Merideth Paxton and Leticia Staines Cicero (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2017) 264 pp. $85.00

With chapters devoted to three regions of ancient Mesoamerica— Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya area—this volume reflects both the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of Mesoamerican studies as well as its international scope. The twelve contributions, by Mexican, American, and European scholars, are loosely tied together by the medium of painting—including murals, ceramics, manuscripts, and body decoration. As the title suggests, the essays incorporate explorations of status, power, community identity, history, and the natural and built environment.

In the first chapter, Paxton and Staines Cicero, both art historians, provide a useful explication of the concept of Mesoamerica and a brief discussion of the early years of Mesoamerican art history, before introducing each of the chapters that follow. This chapter is marred, however, by a puzzling and lengthy digression, including six pages of tables, expanding on the chapter by Mexican ornithologist María de Lourdes Navarijo Ornelas about images of animals and birds painted on Maya ceramics. That short chapter also includes two long editors’ notes. If the editors were not satisfied with the chapter as submitted, they should have worked with Navarijo Ornelas to revise or expand it or dropped it entirely.

Among the chapters about mural painting that stand out is that of archaeologist Davide Domenici, who challenges the notion that Teotihuacan mural painting should always be read as mimetic imagery. Instead, he argues that some images should be read as emblematic or full-figure glyphs that might refer to political or religious offices. Ana García Barrios concludes that the spectacular murals painted on the exterior of the Chiik Nahb’ pyramid at the Classic Maya site of Calakmul, uncovered a decade ago, do not represent a mere market, as previously [End Page 304] believed, but rather a banquet with the active involvement of women preparing and serving the food and drink. Art historian Susan Milbrath and her Mexican co-authors, archaeologists Carlos Peraza Lope and Miguel Delgado Ku, provide a convincing chronology for the murals of Late Postclassic Mayapán based on careful stylistic and iconographic analysis, hypothesizing that later paintings with solar imagery may reflect direct Aztec influence.

A new field of inquiry aims to identify the composition and use of perfumes and cosmetics by ancient Mesoamericans. María Luisa Vázquez de Agredos Pascual and Cristina Vidal Lorenzo, both art historians, have undertaken archaeometric studies of substances recovered from containers found in elite Maya burials, often in minute quantities. These analyses, in tandem with iconographic and ethnohistorical sources, demonstrate that like most other ancient cultures, the Maya prepared both organic and inorganic materials to adorn and perfume themselves, and took body paint and fragrances with them into the afterlife.

Codices and post-Conquest books are the subject of several chapters, including one by Manuel Álvaro Hermann Lejarazu, whose work focuses on translating toponyms in the Mixtec codices and relating them to identifiable natural and man-made places in the Mixtec landscape. Art historian Lori Diel discovers that early colonial Aztec pictorial histories present an ordered sequence of events until contact with the Spanish, after which the historical record becomes chaotic, documenting hardship and loss rather than past triumphs. Angela Marie Herren’s careful examination of the late sixteenth-century Codex Aubin demonstrates how the tlacuilo (artist-scribe) skillfully combined indigenous imagery and alphabetic Nahuatl text in a Western book format, even binding it with recycled European endpapers.

Readers expecting a lavishly illustrated volume will be unimpressed by the quality of the images. For a book about painting, the lack of color plates is particularly glaring. It is disappointing, for example, to see Alfonso Arellano Hernández’s hitherto-unpublished color renderings of Monte Albán tomb murals reproduced in black and white, and at a scale too small to be useful. In fact, many other images throughout the book suffer from their small size, and some of the maps...

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