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Caribbean Figure Pendants : Anthropomorphic Figure Pendants of the Late Ceramic Age in the Greater Antilles.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Taboui SeriesPublisher: Leiden : Sidestone Press, 2020Copyright date: ©2020Edition: 1st edDescription: 1 online resource (275 pages)Content type:
  • text
Media type:
  • computer
Carrier type:
  • online resource
ISBN:
  • 9789088908729
Genre/Form: Additional physical formats: Print version:: Caribbean Figure Pendants: Style and Subject MatterLOC classification:
  • F2172
Online resources:
Contents:
Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Orientation -- The genre -- Nomenclature -- Prior considerations of the genre -- Use and function -- Style and iconography -- Indigenous religion -- Cults and religious specialists -- Divinities -- Cultural context -- Settlement of the Antilles -- Rise of Antillean political complexity -- Ethnolingistic diversity -- Rationale -- Approach to the present study -- The corpus -- Style and styles -- Configurational analysis -- Ethnographic analogy -- The Puerto Plata Style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic distribution -- User modifications -- Other Puerto Plata subjects -- A second manifold being (Figure 2.12, upper row, left and center) -- FGA023 (Figure 2.12, upper row, right) -- IC186 (Figure 2.12, lower row, left) -- IC135 (Figure 2.12, lower row, right) -- Puerto Plata oddities -- IC355 (Figure 2.11, upper row, left) -- IC187 (Figure 2.11, upper row, right) -- IC397 (Figure 2.11, lower row, left) -- Puerto Plata Arms Aloft guise -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on Puerto Plata Arms Aloft guise -- Puerto Plata Frog-form guise -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Puerto Plata Twinned guise -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on Puerto Plata Twinned guise -- Puerto Plata Standard guise, Format 2. Anthropomorph in cylindrical composition -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on Puerto Plata Standard guise, Format 2 -- Puerto Plata Standard guise, Format 1. Anthropomorph in prismatic composition -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on Puerto Plata Standard guise, Format 1.
Sequencing the Puerto Plata style -- Analytical strategy -- Interpretation of the output -- Nonmetric multidimensional scaling of the raw data -- The Yaguajay style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic distribution -- Further notes on the style -- Details of execution -- The head -- The torso and upper limbs -- The lower limbs and genitalia -- The back -- The Madre Vieja style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw material -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic distribution -- Madre Vieja-related oddities -- FGA051 (Figure 5.3, upper row, center) -- FGA060 (Figure 5.3, lower row, right) -- FGA057 (Figure 5.3, lower row, second from left) -- FGA056 (Figure 5.3, lower row, second from left) -- SC024 (Figure 5.3, lower row, left) -- FGA059 (Figure 5.3, upper row, right) -- AM009 (Figure 5.3, upper row, left) -- Madre Vieja marginalia -- IC106 (Figure 5.2, upper row, right) -- IC256 (Figure 5.2, upper row, left) -- IC320 (Figure 5.2, middle row, left) -- IC323 (Figure 5.2, middle row, right) -- IC099 (Figure 5.2, lower row) -- Further notes on the style -- Details of execution -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- The Comendador style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological contexts and dating -- Geographic distribution -- Comendador marginalia -- FGA150 (Figure 6.4, lower row, right) -- IC261 (Figure 6.4, upper row, left) -- IC157 (Figure 6.4, upper row, right) -- IC373 (Figure 6.4, lower row, left) -- Another subject? -- Further notes on the style -- Comendador anthropomorph, Format 2 -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Comendador anthropomorph, Format 1 -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- The Cibao style.
Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological contexts and dating -- Geographic distribution -- User modifications -- Cibao oddities -- IC264 (Figure 7.5, upper row, left) -- IC062 (Figure 7.5, middle row, right) -- IC145 (Figure 7.5, upper row, right) -- IC366 (Figure 7.5, middle row, left) -- IC093 (Figure 7.5, lower) -- Further notes on the style -- Details of execution -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- The Luquillo style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic Distribution -- Other subjects -- IC272 (Figure 8.3, upper row, left) -- IC335 (Figure 8.3, upper row, right) -- IC268, IC337, and IC339 (Figure 8.3, lower row. IC339 not illustrated) -- Luquillo snouted, armless hybrid -- The head -- The torso -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Luquillo frog-form hybrid -- The head -- The torso and limbs -- The genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on the Luquillo frog-form hybrid -- Imbert and related styles -- The Imbert style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic distribution -- Another subject: anthropomorphic hybrids -- Style Group 2 (Figure 9.3, lower row) -- Style Group 1 (Figure 9.3, upper row) -- Imbert-related marginalia and other subjects -- IC043 (Figure 9.1, lower row, right) -- Los Arabos (Figure 9.1, lower row, center) -- Further notes on the style -- The head -- The torso and limbs -- The genitalia -- The back -- Miniatures -- La Caleta, Altagracia, and other styles -- Miscellaneous miniatures -- IC083 (Figure 10.3, upper row, left) -- IC285 (Figure 10.3, upper row, middle) -- IC152 (Figure 10.3, upper row, right) -- IC111 (Figure 10.3, lower row, left) -- IC390 (Figure 10.3, lower row, middle) -- IC160 (Figure 10.3, lower row, right).
Miniature Style Group 4 -- Miniature Style Group 3 -- The Altagracia style -- The head -- The torso -- The legs -- The back -- Geographic distribution -- Raw materials -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- The La Caleta style -- The head -- The torso -- The legs -- The back -- Geographic distribution -- Raw materials -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Same subjects, additional styles -- Frog-form hybrids -- IC361 (Figure 11.5, upper) -- IC026 (Figure 11.5, lower) -- IC162 (Figure 11.6, upper row, left) -- IC069 (Figure 11.6, upper row, right) -- IC265 (Figure 11.6, middle right) -- IC025 (Figure 11.6, lower row, left) -- IC056 (Figure 11.6, lower row, center) -- IC065 (Figure 11.6, lower row, right) -- Snouted, armless hybrids -- IC001 and IC301 (Figure 11.4, upper row, left, right) -- IC107 and IC130 (Figure 11.4, lower row, left, second from left) -- IC038 (Figure 11.4, lower row, third from left) -- IC048 (Figure 11.4, lower row, right) -- Emaciated or partly skeletalized anthropomorphs -- IC092 (Figure 11.3, upper row, left) -- IC206 (Figure 11.3, upper row, right) -- IC047 (Figure 11.3, lower row, left) -- IC234 (Figure 11.3, lower row, middle) -- IC233 (Figure 11.3, lower row, right) -- Fully-fleshed anthropomorphs -- IC044 (Figure 11.1, upper row, left) -- IC354 (Figure 11.1, upper row, right) -- IC191 (Figure 11.1, middle row, left) -- IC159 (Figure 11.1, middle row, right) -- IC367 (Figure 11.1, lower row, left) -- IC173 (Figure 11.1, lower row, right) -- IC244 (Figure 11.2, upper) -- IC219 (Figure 11.2, lower row, left) -- IC257 (Figure 11.2, lower row, right) -- Comparisons -- Connecting elements -- Squatting and the frog-form base -- Matters of iconography -- Major figural characters -- Minor figural characters -- Genital bulge and the faceted triangular wedge -- Armlessness -- Hemispherical eye concavities -- Elliptical slotted eyes.
Mask eye surround -- Bird-form ears -- Coronet -- Headpiece with side-by-side buns -- Lines descending from eyes -- Bared teeth in a wide band -- Supranasal chevron element -- "Reptilian roll" nose -- Arm and hand positions -- Plain necklace-like element -- Navel -- Exposed ribs -- Constrictions at upper arms, lower legs -- Modes of squatting -- Ankle bumps -- Downcurled toes and fingers -- Excised palmar and plantar elements -- Incised meander motif -- Conclusions -- A cult institution -- The nature of crafting communities -- Disconnect with the cohoba rite -- Figure pendants were discarded as refuse -- Figure pendants could be modified and could reach distant places -- Figure pendants occupy a middle ground of social exclusivity -- Styles are linked to subject matter in definite ways -- Styles are geographically restricted -- Styles and their subjects were not fully contemporaneous -- Horizon I, channelback period. Suggested dates: 900‑1200 AD. -- Horizon II, period dominated by elbow-style perforation. Suggested dates:1200‑1350 AD. -- Horizon III, period dominated by transverse perforation. Suggested dates:1350‑1500 AD. -- Discussion -- Bibliography -- Figure Pendants from the Database -- Appendix 1 -- Figure Pendants from the Sala de Arte Prehispánico, Fundación García Arévalo -- Blank Page.
Summary: This work synthesizes art-historical and anthropological methods in the analysis of a large corpus of indigenous figure pendants, commonly called "amulets," from the Greater Antilles and Bahamas. Figure pendants, ubiquitous in Caribbean collections, are small carvings of spirit beings perforated for suspension against the body. The data are drawn from new photographs, measurements, and observations of 535 specimens compiled by the author during 2011-2018 in research visits to 34 museums and private collections in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. In analyzing this corpus, the author documents high stylistic diversity within the region, naming nine new figure pendant styles and situating these in space and time. This high diversity of local styles and subject matter suggests a previously undocumented religious pluralism in the ancient Caribbean, in accord with emergent understandings of cultural and political diversity within the region. The author finds that the subject matter of figure pendants is unconnected with elite cohoba spiritualism as documented ethnohistorically, which leads to a search for what the phenomenon represents socially and religiously. Figure pendants generally are far more common than the paraphernalia of cohoba, probably documenting the existence of a religious institution existing at the village level. The author hypothesizes that they were commissioned from pendant carvers by initiates of secret societies dedicated to healing or warfare. In this scenario, the supernatural subjects of the pendants were the patrons of regional sodalities with distinct histories.The book is intended for readers with interests in the indigenous art, religion and society of the ancient Caribbean and more broadly, Latin America.
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Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Orientation -- The genre -- Nomenclature -- Prior considerations of the genre -- Use and function -- Style and iconography -- Indigenous religion -- Cults and religious specialists -- Divinities -- Cultural context -- Settlement of the Antilles -- Rise of Antillean political complexity -- Ethnolingistic diversity -- Rationale -- Approach to the present study -- The corpus -- Style and styles -- Configurational analysis -- Ethnographic analogy -- The Puerto Plata Style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic distribution -- User modifications -- Other Puerto Plata subjects -- A second manifold being (Figure 2.12, upper row, left and center) -- FGA023 (Figure 2.12, upper row, right) -- IC186 (Figure 2.12, lower row, left) -- IC135 (Figure 2.12, lower row, right) -- Puerto Plata oddities -- IC355 (Figure 2.11, upper row, left) -- IC187 (Figure 2.11, upper row, right) -- IC397 (Figure 2.11, lower row, left) -- Puerto Plata Arms Aloft guise -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on Puerto Plata Arms Aloft guise -- Puerto Plata Frog-form guise -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Puerto Plata Twinned guise -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on Puerto Plata Twinned guise -- Puerto Plata Standard guise, Format 2. Anthropomorph in cylindrical composition -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on Puerto Plata Standard guise, Format 2 -- Puerto Plata Standard guise, Format 1. Anthropomorph in prismatic composition -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on Puerto Plata Standard guise, Format 1.

Sequencing the Puerto Plata style -- Analytical strategy -- Interpretation of the output -- Nonmetric multidimensional scaling of the raw data -- The Yaguajay style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic distribution -- Further notes on the style -- Details of execution -- The head -- The torso and upper limbs -- The lower limbs and genitalia -- The back -- The Madre Vieja style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw material -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic distribution -- Madre Vieja-related oddities -- FGA051 (Figure 5.3, upper row, center) -- FGA060 (Figure 5.3, lower row, right) -- FGA057 (Figure 5.3, lower row, second from left) -- FGA056 (Figure 5.3, lower row, second from left) -- SC024 (Figure 5.3, lower row, left) -- FGA059 (Figure 5.3, upper row, right) -- AM009 (Figure 5.3, upper row, left) -- Madre Vieja marginalia -- IC106 (Figure 5.2, upper row, right) -- IC256 (Figure 5.2, upper row, left) -- IC320 (Figure 5.2, middle row, left) -- IC323 (Figure 5.2, middle row, right) -- IC099 (Figure 5.2, lower row) -- Further notes on the style -- Details of execution -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- The Comendador style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological contexts and dating -- Geographic distribution -- Comendador marginalia -- FGA150 (Figure 6.4, lower row, right) -- IC261 (Figure 6.4, upper row, left) -- IC157 (Figure 6.4, upper row, right) -- IC373 (Figure 6.4, lower row, left) -- Another subject? -- Further notes on the style -- Comendador anthropomorph, Format 2 -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Comendador anthropomorph, Format 1 -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- The Cibao style.

Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological contexts and dating -- Geographic distribution -- User modifications -- Cibao oddities -- IC264 (Figure 7.5, upper row, left) -- IC062 (Figure 7.5, middle row, right) -- IC145 (Figure 7.5, upper row, right) -- IC366 (Figure 7.5, middle row, left) -- IC093 (Figure 7.5, lower) -- Further notes on the style -- Details of execution -- The head -- The torso and arms -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- The Luquillo style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic Distribution -- Other subjects -- IC272 (Figure 8.3, upper row, left) -- IC335 (Figure 8.3, upper row, right) -- IC268, IC337, and IC339 (Figure 8.3, lower row. IC339 not illustrated) -- Luquillo snouted, armless hybrid -- The head -- The torso -- The legs and genitalia -- The back -- Luquillo frog-form hybrid -- The head -- The torso and limbs -- The genitalia -- The back -- Further notes on the Luquillo frog-form hybrid -- Imbert and related styles -- The Imbert style -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Raw materials -- Archaeological context and dating -- Geographic distribution -- Another subject: anthropomorphic hybrids -- Style Group 2 (Figure 9.3, lower row) -- Style Group 1 (Figure 9.3, upper row) -- Imbert-related marginalia and other subjects -- IC043 (Figure 9.1, lower row, right) -- Los Arabos (Figure 9.1, lower row, center) -- Further notes on the style -- The head -- The torso and limbs -- The genitalia -- The back -- Miniatures -- La Caleta, Altagracia, and other styles -- Miscellaneous miniatures -- IC083 (Figure 10.3, upper row, left) -- IC285 (Figure 10.3, upper row, middle) -- IC152 (Figure 10.3, upper row, right) -- IC111 (Figure 10.3, lower row, left) -- IC390 (Figure 10.3, lower row, middle) -- IC160 (Figure 10.3, lower row, right).

Miniature Style Group 4 -- Miniature Style Group 3 -- The Altagracia style -- The head -- The torso -- The legs -- The back -- Geographic distribution -- Raw materials -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- The La Caleta style -- The head -- The torso -- The legs -- The back -- Geographic distribution -- Raw materials -- Preliminary iconographic notes -- Same subjects, additional styles -- Frog-form hybrids -- IC361 (Figure 11.5, upper) -- IC026 (Figure 11.5, lower) -- IC162 (Figure 11.6, upper row, left) -- IC069 (Figure 11.6, upper row, right) -- IC265 (Figure 11.6, middle right) -- IC025 (Figure 11.6, lower row, left) -- IC056 (Figure 11.6, lower row, center) -- IC065 (Figure 11.6, lower row, right) -- Snouted, armless hybrids -- IC001 and IC301 (Figure 11.4, upper row, left, right) -- IC107 and IC130 (Figure 11.4, lower row, left, second from left) -- IC038 (Figure 11.4, lower row, third from left) -- IC048 (Figure 11.4, lower row, right) -- Emaciated or partly skeletalized anthropomorphs -- IC092 (Figure 11.3, upper row, left) -- IC206 (Figure 11.3, upper row, right) -- IC047 (Figure 11.3, lower row, left) -- IC234 (Figure 11.3, lower row, middle) -- IC233 (Figure 11.3, lower row, right) -- Fully-fleshed anthropomorphs -- IC044 (Figure 11.1, upper row, left) -- IC354 (Figure 11.1, upper row, right) -- IC191 (Figure 11.1, middle row, left) -- IC159 (Figure 11.1, middle row, right) -- IC367 (Figure 11.1, lower row, left) -- IC173 (Figure 11.1, lower row, right) -- IC244 (Figure 11.2, upper) -- IC219 (Figure 11.2, lower row, left) -- IC257 (Figure 11.2, lower row, right) -- Comparisons -- Connecting elements -- Squatting and the frog-form base -- Matters of iconography -- Major figural characters -- Minor figural characters -- Genital bulge and the faceted triangular wedge -- Armlessness -- Hemispherical eye concavities -- Elliptical slotted eyes.

Mask eye surround -- Bird-form ears -- Coronet -- Headpiece with side-by-side buns -- Lines descending from eyes -- Bared teeth in a wide band -- Supranasal chevron element -- "Reptilian roll" nose -- Arm and hand positions -- Plain necklace-like element -- Navel -- Exposed ribs -- Constrictions at upper arms, lower legs -- Modes of squatting -- Ankle bumps -- Downcurled toes and fingers -- Excised palmar and plantar elements -- Incised meander motif -- Conclusions -- A cult institution -- The nature of crafting communities -- Disconnect with the cohoba rite -- Figure pendants were discarded as refuse -- Figure pendants could be modified and could reach distant places -- Figure pendants occupy a middle ground of social exclusivity -- Styles are linked to subject matter in definite ways -- Styles are geographically restricted -- Styles and their subjects were not fully contemporaneous -- Horizon I, channelback period. Suggested dates: 900‑1200 AD. -- Horizon II, period dominated by elbow-style perforation. Suggested dates:1200‑1350 AD. -- Horizon III, period dominated by transverse perforation. Suggested dates:1350‑1500 AD. -- Discussion -- Bibliography -- Figure Pendants from the Database -- Appendix 1 -- Figure Pendants from the Sala de Arte Prehispánico, Fundación García Arévalo -- Blank Page.

This work synthesizes art-historical and anthropological methods in the analysis of a large corpus of indigenous figure pendants, commonly called "amulets," from the Greater Antilles and Bahamas. Figure pendants, ubiquitous in Caribbean collections, are small carvings of spirit beings perforated for suspension against the body. The data are drawn from new photographs, measurements, and observations of 535 specimens compiled by the author during 2011-2018 in research visits to 34 museums and private collections in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. In analyzing this corpus, the author documents high stylistic diversity within the region, naming nine new figure pendant styles and situating these in space and time. This high diversity of local styles and subject matter suggests a previously undocumented religious pluralism in the ancient Caribbean, in accord with emergent understandings of cultural and political diversity within the region. The author finds that the subject matter of figure pendants is unconnected with elite cohoba spiritualism as documented ethnohistorically, which leads to a search for what the phenomenon represents socially and religiously. Figure pendants generally are far more common than the paraphernalia of cohoba, probably documenting the existence of a religious institution existing at the village level. The author hypothesizes that they were commissioned from pendant carvers by initiates of secret societies dedicated to healing or warfare. In this scenario, the supernatural subjects of the pendants were the patrons of regional sodalities with distinct histories.The book is intended for readers with interests in the indigenous art, religion and society of the ancient Caribbean and more broadly, Latin America.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.

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