This handsome volume is one of the series, Art of the World, published in this country by Crown Publishers. The many colored plates of remarkably high quality are supplemented by maps and a large number of line drawings. These line drawings often make a point more clearly than a photograph. The colored plates, like those of many other current books on art, are only tipped in. This method of presenting colored illustrations is not completely satisfactory, since there is always the danger that they will be detached and lost or folded upon themselves and creased. The colored plates in this book seem to be extremely carefully printed and remarkably faithful to the original work of art they reproduce.
The text is essentially two distinct works: That part by Linné deals with Mexico and Central America. The other half by Disselhoff deals with Greater Peru and its neighboring regions to the north and east into the Amazon Valley. There is a chronological table for each section of text, a joint bibliography of general works, and a glossary.
Linné’s text concentrates on the cultures of highland Mexico (6 chapters) and discusses the western and coastal regions (2 chapters) as well as the Maya (1 chapter). Disselhoff deals with Greater Peru in one long chapter and devotes one chapter each to the setting, the eastern lowlands, Colombia, and the San Agustín Culture. Within this broad description of the text we find the material organized in chronological patterns which aim at demonstrating the development of successive styles of art and the evolution of Pre-Columbian cultures in more general terms.
This reviewer would question the statement made twice (pages 33 and 83) that Nezahualcóyotl, ruler of Texcoco, claimed descent from the “priest-kings of Teotihuacán.” A question raised on the choice of illustrations for such a compact book becomes essentially only a matter of judgment, but this reviewer misses any illustration of a Mixtec manuscript, although the manuscripts are mentioned in text. The reproduction of a page of such a manuscript at the same high level of quality as the other illustrations would have been an extremely valuable addition to the book.
One feels that Professor Linné tends to dismiss the Mixtecs too lightly when he says (page 76) “that they cannot boast of a very long recorded history.” On the next page he cites Caso’s genealogical studies of the Mixtec history manuscripts going back as far as 670 a.d. and extending to 1521 (sic), surely a longer span of history than the recorded history of the Aztecs—“it was only in 1318 or 1325 that they finally settled down to build towns” (page 82). As a matter of fact the recorded history of the Mixtecs is remarkable for its detail and the fact that it is the longest written history of any New World people.
Disselhoff’s text on Greater Peru extends beyond the usual boundaries of the Andean civilizations to discuss the archaeology of the Amazon Valley and the recent work being done east of the Andes. The colored plate on page 209 of this section of the book illustrates an extremely handsome piece of kelim fabric (a term not defined in the glossary) and says that it has “mythological figures in the form of picture writing”; this provocative statement is not elaborated in the text.
One misses reference to any illustrations of the Inca site of Machu Picchu. This site presents us with significant data on Inca architecture, because it has not been built over like Cuzco, for instance, but rather remained unknown since Inca times until Hiram Bingham’s expedition discovered it.
The book remains a handy and convenient compendium of information on Pre-Hispanic America with a fine collection of colored plates. The questions raised above come in great part from putting so much information into such a compressed work. Given a longer text which could elaborate stacatto statements, the two authors could have been more explicit and could have explained their material at greater length. Even within the editor’s limitations, the authors have given us a useful and usable elementary anthology with the added advantage that many of the objects published in its fine colored plates are lesser known objects from European collections, some here published for the first time.
