This is merely another of the many recent books concerned with aboriginal American art. Anton and Dockstader have brought together 272 illustrations of art objects and archaeological sites. The quality of the photographs and the color reproduction of the plates is generally good, but the title of the book is somewhat misleading, because the collection of illustrations is far from balanced. Most of the pictures, 228 to be precise, show archaeological objects or sites in Latin America. Of these pictures, 161 deal with Mexico or the Maya area, 18 with the region between Nicaragua and Colombia, and 49 with Peru and Bolivia. The other 44 show ethnographic objects, nine from Latin America, and the others from areas north of the Rio Grande. The illustrations reflect the range of materials that are typically shown in these recent art books: a pot or two from Tlatilco, textiles from the Peruvian coast, views of Machu Picchu and other archaeological sites, gold work from Colombia, and some Maya stela or stone carving. What is interesting about the specimens illustrated by Anton and Dockstader is that many of them have not appeared in print before, because they belong to private collectors or dealers in antiquities. Consequently the illustrations will be of some value to the specialist in aboriginal art.
Unfortunately the text does not equal the illustrations in quality. Some of the statements are misleading; for example, why are “the most important of the Paracas ceramics . . . those in the Ocucaje style” (p. 176)? Could it perhaps be that more of them have been purchased by collectors and dealers who support the extensive looting of archaeological sites in this part of the Ica Valley? Other statements in the text are simply erroneous; Anton, for example, writes about the puma-god of the Chavín cult, when in fact representations of any kind of feline are exceedingly rare in the so-called Chavín styles. Indeed, they are virtually nonexistent at the type site of Chavín de Huantar itself, as the recent excavations of Hernán Amat and Luis Lumbreras have shown.
There is a fundamentally more important reason for the poor quality of the text. It does not provide an adequate context for viewing any of the illustrated archaeological objects. The authors mention none of the vast archaeological research that has been carried out in Latin America since 1960, either in the text or in the bibliography. Some results of these investigations have significantly changed many of our previous views about cultural development in Mesoamerica, the intermediate area, and the Central Andes; yet they were not taken into consideration when the text was written.
What we do not need at the present time are more art books like this one, even though its illustrations are excellent and its price reasonable. We do need well-illustrated general publications that deal with various aspects of aboriginal American art. They should have well-written, accurate, up-to-date texts that provide adequate contexts for carefully selected illustrations.
