“…By the twentieth century, the art form had largely been abandoned. The few drawings from the early years of the century were produced by old men, replicating forms of their youth, often at the urging of white historians, while children were learning a different art in school (Berlo 1996).…”
Section: Background On Ledger Artmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Sitting Bull's drawings have been widely published, to illustrate his biography (Utley 1993;Vestal 1932) or as examples of Plains graphic art (Maurer 1992;Berlo 1996). I am interested instead in exploring how the images carry meaning within a wider Plains system of historical representation.…”
A distinct form of Plains Indian historical narrative, the recounting of war deeds known as coup, was once produced through two linked forms of expression: oral recitation and pictorial representation. Many nineteenth-century examples of the visual component have survived, now separated from their oral component. A rare example in which both narrative strands have been preserved presents an opportunity to examine the types of information included in each, to consider the ways in which the different strands were deployed toward social ends, and to gain insights into Lakota historical consciousness. The materials were created by the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull in 1882 while a prisoner of the US Army.
“…By the twentieth century, the art form had largely been abandoned. The few drawings from the early years of the century were produced by old men, replicating forms of their youth, often at the urging of white historians, while children were learning a different art in school (Berlo 1996).…”
Section: Background On Ledger Artmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Sitting Bull's drawings have been widely published, to illustrate his biography (Utley 1993;Vestal 1932) or as examples of Plains graphic art (Maurer 1992;Berlo 1996). I am interested instead in exploring how the images carry meaning within a wider Plains system of historical representation.…”
A distinct form of Plains Indian historical narrative, the recounting of war deeds known as coup, was once produced through two linked forms of expression: oral recitation and pictorial representation. Many nineteenth-century examples of the visual component have survived, now separated from their oral component. A rare example in which both narrative strands have been preserved presents an opportunity to examine the types of information included in each, to consider the ways in which the different strands were deployed toward social ends, and to gain insights into Lakota historical consciousness. The materials were created by the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull in 1882 while a prisoner of the US Army.
“…Throughout the last century, collectors and curators from around the world traveled to the American Southwest in search of things. These collecting efforts, we now know, embraced a wide range of practices, from evenhanded exchanges to semilegitimate digging tours to outright theft (Berlo 1992;Hinsley 1992Hinsley , 2000Parezo 1985). With but few exceptions these methods involved removing objects from their cultural and geographic setting and re-contextualizing them in distant institutions through processes of museum-making-document-ing, cataloguing, storing, selling, and displaying things (Barringer and Flynn 1998).…”
“…Despite their significance, these objects remain largely unstudied and partly unpublished. Janet Berlo's work on Teotihuacan-style art in Escuintla (1983, 1984) is an exception that provides an important precedent for this article.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…However, the lid is uniquely shaped as a split cacao pod resting on two others, all molded from natural cacao pods. Following Thompson's (1956) insights on the sacrificial symbolism of cacao, Berlo (1983:96; 1984:108) interpreted this object as “a ritual metaphor for human hearts and blood.” Figure 2. Censer lid that shows a split cacao pod. The emerging character has a human face, butterfly wings, and a headdress that combines butterfly and avian attributes.…”
This article explores the sacrificial symbolism of cacao (Theobroma sp.) on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, manifest in the iconography of ceramic objects and stone sculptures from the Classic period, in textual references from the colonial period, and in contemporary ethnographic data from the southern highlands. The iconographic and textual metaphors contained in these sources linked cacao pods with dead warriors, captives, and sacrificial victims. As interpreted in this article, the harvest of cacao was equated with the acquisition of sacrificial victims, and both were conceived as precious sources of nourishment for the gods. Changes in artistic representations are discernible from Early Classic Teotihuacan-style censers to Early Postclassic Plumbate ceramic effigies. Cacao and other fruits from the Pacific coastal piedmont are still related to the symbolism of war and sacrifice in contemporary rituals from the Tz'utujil town of Santiago Atitlán. Data from southern Guatemala may be relevant to understand the sacrificial symbolism of cacao throughout Mesoamerica.
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