The Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Germany, houses Europe's largest collection of PreColumbian textiles-around 9000 well-preserved examples. Lena Bjerregaard was conservator of these materials 2000-2014, and she worked with many international researchers to analyze and publicize the collection. This book includes seven of their essays on the museum's holdings - by Bea Hoffmann, Ann Peters, Susan Bergh, Lena Bjerregaard, Jane Feltham, Katalin Nagy, and Gary Urton. Its second part is a 177-page catalogue of 273 selected representative items, arranged by period and style. There are more than 380 photographs. Styles or cultures shown include Paracas, Nasca, Sican/Lambayeque, Ychsma, Chavin, Siguas, Tiwanaku, Wari, Chimu, Central Coast, Chancay, South Coast, Inca, and Colonial. Items pictured include tunics, clothing, tapestry, hats, belts, headbands, samplers, borders, and khipus. Materials include camelid fibers, feathers, hair, cotton, reed, straw, and other plant fibers.

Along the coast of Peru is one of the driest deserts in the world. Here, under the sand, the ancient Peruvians buried their dead wrapped in gorgeous textiles. As organic material keeps almost forever when stored without humidity, light and oxygen, many of the mummies excavated in the last hundred years are in excellent conditions. And so are the textiles wrapped around them. Their clear colors are still dazzling and the textile fibers in good condition. Textiles were highly valued objects in ancient Peru - used for expressing status and diverse messages in these non-literate but highly organized and very developed cultures. Much energy, innovation and aesthetic sensibility were invested in the textiles. The preColumbian peoples had access to exquisite materials: the local fibers were camelid fibers (alpaca and vicuña), cotton and plant fibers (agave, for instance). The camelid fibers have very little scales compared to sheep fibers, and are long, soft and lustrous. The Peruvian cotton grew in 5 different colors. The ancient Peruvians were also master dyers and have for thousands of years dyed their yarn with indigo blue, madder red, cochineal red, sea snail purple and yellow from many kinds of plants. And so they produced some of the finest, most beautiful and most interesting textiles in the world. Instead of writing, they kept the order in their world encoded in textile fibers. The Roemer- and Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim houses a collection of 405 preColumbian textiles. Most of them are fragments, but a few complete pieces are present. I have chosen 133 pieces for this publication, to represent the collection at its best.

From May 31st to June 4th, 2016, the 7th International European conference on pre-Columbian textiles was held in Copenhagen. This volume unites seven original articles on pre-Columbian textiles from Mexico, which compare information on 20th century finds first described by Alba Guadelupe Mastache with that from previously unpublished finds and recently discovered contexts. A unique chapter presents the technical analysis and replication of a pre-Columbian tunic recovered in a cave site in Arizona, at the northern margins of the Mesoamerican interaction sphere. Thirteen articles on archaeological textiles from the central Andes include analysis of both textile assemblages preserved in museum collections and those recovered during recent fieldwork in archaeological sites of the Andean desert coast. These include textile assemblages representing the Initial and Formative Periods, Paracas and Nasca contexts, the Middle Horizon, diverse late Intermediate Period assemblages and emblematic Inca garments.

Expanding the understanding of textile and fiber arts, this edition of the Bulletin features two distinct bodies of work that are intimately connected despite being separated by hundreds of years. Placing ancient Andean textiles from South America by unknown artists in conversation with works by global modern practitioners—such as Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, and Olga de Amaral—Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art shows how both traditions harnessed the structure of the loom to create dynamic geometric designs. The 50 extraordinary pieces in this volume span over 2000 years and illustrate weaving’s complex and varied ways of conveying meaning, from stunning iconography to bold structural choices. In highlighting the aesthetic and cultural choices of both ancient and modern artists, this publication elevates textile arts beyond mere ornament to assert their role in the history of art past and present.

Pottery is one of the world’s most ancient and widespread technologies. Containing the Divine: Ancient Peruvian Pots explores how ceramic vessels can convey meaning far beyond their practical use. As this Bulletin attests, before the implementation of writing as we understand it today, Andean artisans used the shape and decoration of jars and bottles to communicate essential information for ritual practice and to promote the exchange of ideas. The more than 40 evocative works featured in these pages represent some 2,500 years of creativity in ancient Peru, with a focus on how these imaginative works served as conduits to worldly and divine power. Providing a rich opportunity to reflect on devotional practices of the past and today, Containing the Divine also shows how the legacy of these pots has inspired subsequent generations worldwide, from nineteenth-century British potters and French Post-Impressionist Paul Gaugin to contemporary Peruvian artist Juan Javier Salazar.

This eighth volume of Imagine Math is different from all the previous ones. The reason is very clear: in the last two years, the world changed, and we still do not know what the world of tomorrow will look like. Difficult to make predictions. This volume has a subtitle Dreaming Venice. Venice, the dream city of dreams, that miraculous image of a city on water that resisted for hundreds of years, has become in the last two years truly unreachable. Many things tie this book to the previous ones. Once again, this volume also starts like Imagine Math 7, with a homage to the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino who created exclusively for the Imagine Math 8 volume a new series of ten original and unique works of art dedicated to Piero della Francesca. Many artists, art historians, designers and musicians are involved in the new book, including Linda D. Henderson and Marco Pierini, Claudio Ambrosini and Davide Amodio. Space also for comics and mathematics in a Disney key. Many applications, from Origami to mathematical models for world hunger. Particular attention to classical and modern architecture, with Tullia Iori. As usual, the topics are treated in a way that is rigorous but captivating, detailed and full of evocations. This is an all-embracing look at the world of mathematics and culture.

The untold chronicles of the looting and collecting of ancient Mesoamerican objects. This book traces the fascinating history of how and why ancient Mesoamerican objects have been collected. It begins with the pre-Hispanic antiquities that first entered European collections in the sixteenth century as gifts or seizures, continues through the rise of systematic collecting in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ends in 1940—the start of Europe’s art market collapse at the outbreak of World War II and the coinciding genesis of the large-scale art market for pre-Hispanic antiquities in the United States. Drawing upon archival resources and international museum collections, the contributors analyze the ways shifting patterns of collecting and taste—including how pre-Hispanic objects changed from being viewed as anthropological and scientific curiosities to collectible artworks—have shaped modern academic disciplines as well as public, private, institutional, and nationalistic attitudes toward Mesoamerican art. As many nations across the world demand the return of their cultural patrimony and ancestral heritage, it is essential to examine the historical processes, events, and actors that initially removed so many objects from their countries of origin.