Mask arts of Mexico

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Ada Gabucci

This pocket-size reference draws on the vast treasures of this ancient civilization to illustrate the remarkable achievements of one of the great empires of the West, from the traditional date of Rome's founding - 754 B.C. - -until the fall of the Western Empire in A.D. 476, the year in which the last emperor, the boy Romulus Augustus, was deposed by the Goths and the imperial insignia was sent to Constantinople. Rome opens with a section on the major personages, such as Romulus and Remus, Pompey, and Constantine; each concise biography is complemented by full-color reproductions of portraits, ivories, coins, and monuments. A section on power and public life includes the grain dole, the army, the city's archives, and its imperial triumphs. A chapter on religion considers the major gods and cults, "Oriental" rites, and Christianity. The chapter devoted to daily life includes makeup, gambling, and portraiture, and is followed by a section on funerals and the dead. A section on the layout of the city is a must-read for any tourist to Rome. The book includes a map of the ancient city, a chronology, accounts of the major museums, an index, and a bibliography.

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Peter Macnair, Robert Joseph, Bruce Grenville

Based on a major exhibition of masks from the Northwest coast, this book features photographs of over 150 masks from North America and Europe. The masks are manifestations of ancestral spirits as well as works of art. Issues of aesthetics, changes in form and subthemes are explored.

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John T. Paoletti & Gary M. Radke

A glance at the pages of Art in Renaissance Italy shows at once its freshness and breadth of approach, which includes: How and why works at art, buildings, prints, and other kinds of art came to be; how men and women of the Renaissance regarded art and artists; and why works of Renaissance art look the way they do, and what this means to us. Unlike other books on the subject, this one covers not only Florence and Rome. Here too are Venice and the Veneto, Assisi, Siena, Milan, Pavia, Padua, Mantua, Verona, Ferrara, Urbino, and Naples - each governed in a distinctly different manner, every one with its own political and social structures that inevitably affected artistic styles. Spanning more than three centuries, the narrative brings to life the rich tapestry of Italian Renaissance society and the art works that are its enduring legacy. Throughout, special features evoke and document the people and places of this dynamic age.

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Michael A. Adler

From the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century, the world of the ancestral Pueblo people (Anasazi) was in transition, undergoing changes in settlement patterns and community organization that resulted in what scholars now call the Pueblo III period. This book synthesizes the archaeology of the ancestral Pueblo world during the Pueblo III period, examining twelve regions of the Anasazi world that embrace nearly the entire range of major topographic features, ecological zones, and prehistoric Puebloan settlement patterns found in the northern Southwest. Drawn from the 1990 Crow Canyon Archaeological Center conference "Pueblo Cultures in Transition," the book serves as both a data resource and a summary of ideas about prehistoric changes in Puebloan settlement and in regional interaction across nearly 150,000 square miles of the Southwest. The volume provides a compilation of settlement data for over 800 large sites occupied between A.D. 1100 and 1400 in the Southwest. These data provide new perspectives on the geographic scale of culture change in the Southwest during this period. Twelve chapters analyze the archaeological record for specific districts and provide a detailed picture of settlement size and distribution, community architecture, and population trends during the period. Additional chapters cover warfare and carrying capacity and provide overviews of change in the region. Throughout the chapters, the contributors address the unifying issues of the role of large sites in relation to smaller ones, changes in settlement patterns from the Pueblo II to Pueblo III periods, changes in community organization, and population dynamics.