Abstract:

For more than 45 years, the Peabody Museum has been publishing The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. The goal of this unique series of folio volumes is to document in photographs and detailed line drawings all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art to advance the study of the ancient Maya. When complete, the Corpus will have published the inscriptions from over 200 sites and 2,000 monuments. The series has been instrumental in the remarkable success of the ongoing process of deciphering Maya writing, making available hundreds of texts to epigraphers working around the world, and to source communities in in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

Each volume in the series consists of three or more fascicles, which examine an individual site or group of neighboring sites and include maps of site location and plans indicating the placement monuments within each site. Each inscription is reproduced in its entirety in both photographs and line drawings with descriptive texts. 

Volume 3 documents the lintels and hieroglyphic stairways  of Yaxchilan, Chiapas, Mexico.

Abstract:

For more than 45 years, the Peabody Museum has been publishing The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. The goal of this unique series of folio volumes is to document in photographs and detailed line drawings all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art to advance the study of the ancient Maya. When complete, the Corpus will have published the inscriptions from over 200 sites and 2,000 monuments. The series has been instrumental in the remarkable success of the ongoing process of deciphering Maya writing, making available hundreds of texts to epigraphers working around the world, and to source communities in in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

Each volume in the series consists of three or more fascicles, which examine an individual site or group of neighboring sites and include maps of site location and plans indicating the placement monuments within each site. Each inscription is reproduced in its entirety in both photographs and line drawings with descriptive texts.

Volume 3 documents the lintels and hieroglyphic stairways  of Yaxchilan, Chiapas, Mexico.

 

Abstract:

For more than 45 years, the Peabody Museum has been publishing The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. The goal of this unique series of folio volumes is to document in photographs and detailed line drawings all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art to advance the study of the ancient Maya. When complete, the Corpus will have published the inscriptions from over 200 sites and 2,000 monuments. The series has been instrumental in the remarkable success of the ongoing process of deciphering Maya writing, making available hundreds of texts to epigraphers working around the world, and to source communities in in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

Each volume in the series consists of three or more fascicles, which examine an individual site or group of neighboring sites and include maps of site location and plans indicating the placement monuments within each site. Each inscription is reproduced in its entirety in both photographs and line drawings with descriptive texts.

 

Abstract:

For more than 45 years, the Peabody Museum has been publishing The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. The goal of this unique series of folio volumes is to document in photographs and detailed line drawings all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art to advance the study of the ancient Maya. When complete, the Corpus will have published the inscriptions from over 200 sites and 2,000 monuments. The series has been instrumental in the remarkable success of the ongoing process of deciphering Maya writing, making available hundreds of texts to epigraphers working around the world, and to source communities in in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

Each volume in the series consists of three or more fascicles, which examine an individual site or group of neighboring sites and include maps of site location and plans indicating the placement monuments within each site. Each inscription is reproduced in its entirety in both photographs and line drawings with descriptive texts.

 

Abstract:

Excavations at the open-air site of Holon, Israel, have provided a unique perspective on hominin behavior, technology, and subsistence strategies in the Middle East at the end of the Lower Paleolithic. This excavation, carried out by Tamar Noy between 1963 and 1970, was one of the first successful salvage projects in the region. This ASPR volume is the first integrated monograph on a Lower Paleolithic site to be published from the region. It brings together the results of interdisciplinary research on the site of Holon—geology, dating, archaeology, paleontology, taphonomy, and spatial analysis—by a team of leading international researchers. The results are synthesized to address fundamental questions of human evolution, including whether early hominins hunted or scavenged very large animals, and the nature of culture change in the Lower Paleolithic. The lithic analysis documents the final stage of the Lower Paleolithic before the transition to Middle Paleolithic technology. This book will be an essential point of reference for students and specialists working in the archaeology of human evolution, as well as all archaeologists working in the region of the Levant.

Abstract:

The Levantine corridor sits at the continental crossroads of Africa and Eurasia, making it a focal point for scientific inquiry into the emergence of modern humans and their relations with Neanderthals. The recent excavations at Kebara Cave in Israel, undertaken by an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers, has provided data crucial for understanding the cognitive and behavioral differences between archaic and modern humans.

In this first of two volumes, the authors discuss site formation processes, subsistence strategies, land-use patterns, and intrasite organization. Hearths and faunal remains reveal a dynamic and changing settlement system during the late Mousterian period, when Kebara Cave served as a major encampment. The research at Kebara Cave allows archaeologists to document the variability observed in settlement, subsistence, and technological strategies of the Late Middle and early Upper Paleolithic periods in the Levant.

Abstract:

The remains from Skhul, Qafzeh, Amud, and Kebara caves in Israel provide evidence for the possible contemporaneity and eventual replacement of several distinct hominin populations over time: early Archaic-Modern humans by Neanderthals, and Neanderthals by Modern humans. Kebara Cave, which dates to 65,000 to 48,000 years ago, is well known for its Neanderthal remains and marvelously preserved archaeological record. Dense concentrations of fireplaces and ash lenses and rich assemblages of stone tools, animal bones, and charred plant remains testify to repeated and intensive use of the cave by late Middle Paleolithic foragers.

This second and final volume of the Kebara Cave site report presents findings from nine years of excavation and analysis of the archaeology, paleontology, human remains, and lithic industries from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods. Its full documentation of the daily activities of the cave’s Neanderthal inhabitants clearly indicates behavioral patterns generally attributed only to Modern humans. The two volumes on Kebara Cave provide a cornerstone for the story of humankind in a critical geographic region: the continental crossroads between Africa and Eurasia in the Levant.

Abstract:

These three volumes deal with the Iron Age grave materials from Magdalenska gora, excavated by the Duchess Paul Friedrich von Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Duchess of Mecklenburg, a member of an Austrian royal family with estates in Slovenia, conducted her excavations in the early years of the twentieth century. The materials from Magdalenska gora were purchased by the Peabody Museum in the 1930s.

Volume I presents data and analysis of the horse remains and human skeletal materials.

Abstract:

Honorable Mention, 2008 NEMA Awards (Books Over $10)

Robert Gardner’s classic Dead Birds is one of the most highly acclaimed and controversial documentary films ever made. This detailed and candid account of the process of making Dead Birds, from the birth of the idea through filming in New Guinea to editing and releasing the finished film, is more than the chronicle of a single work. It is also a thoughtful examination of what it meant to record the moving and violent rituals of warrior-farmers in the New Guinea highlands and to present to the world a graphic story of their behavior as a window onto our own. Letters, journals, telegrams, newspaper clippings, and over 50 images are assembled to recreate a vivid chronology of events. Making Dead Birds not only addresses the art and practice of filmmaking, but also explores issues of representation and the discovery of meaning in human lives.

Gardner led a remarkable cast of participants on the 1961 expedition. All brought back extraordinary bodies of work. Probably most influential of all was Dead Birds, which marked a sea change in nonfiction filmmaking. This book takes the reader inside the creative process of making that landmark film and offers a revealing look into the heart and mind of one of the great filmmakers of our time.

Abstract:

Engraved shell gorgets are found throughout prehistoric southeastern North America. The artistic sophistication of these gorgets lends itself to the sensitive stylistic and chronological analysis offered here. In part one of this volume, the gorgets are classified into styles; in part two, described archaeological sites are analyzed for associations and chronology; and in part three, information about the gorgets is correlated with other artifactual evidence, and patterns of intersite distribution are examined for chronological insights and dynamic interpretations.

Abstract:

Bronze Medal, 2021 IPPY Awards

Winner, 2021 John Collier Jr. Award

Honorable Mention, 2022 LASA Visual Culture Section Book Award

As a young Fulbright scholar in Bogotá determined to democratize the photographic gaze and bring new visions and voices to public debate about Colombia’s armed conflict, Alexander L. Fattal founded Disparando Cámaras para la Paz (Shooting Cameras for Peace). The project taught photography to young people in El Progreso, a neighborhood on the city’s outskirts that was home to families displaced by violence in the countryside. Cameras in hand, the youth had a chance to record and reimagine their daily existence.

Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz is a penetrating look at one of Latin America’s most dynamic participatory media projects. The haunting and exuberant photographs made under its auspices testify to young people’s will to play, to dream, and to survive. The images bear witness to the resilience and creativity of lives marked by a war that refuses to die.

With text in English and Spanish, Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz makes vital contributions to studies of collaborative media, photographic activism, and peace and conflict in Colombia. Fattal’s insightful text offers critical reflection on the genre of participatory photography and the structural challenges faced by similar media projects.

Abstract:

Still Points is a collection of remarkable and evocative still photographs taken by award-winning nonfiction filmmaker and author Robert Gardner during his anthropological and filming expeditions around the world. Thousands of his original photographic transparencies and negatives from the Kalahari Desert, New Guinea, Colombia, India, Ethiopia, Niger, and other remote locations are now housed in the Photographic Archives of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. This elegantly produced volume presents a curated selection of more than 70 color and black-and-white images made by Gardner between the 1950s and the 1980s. Edited by Adele Pressman, Gardner’s wife and literary executor, and with a foreword by Eliot Weinberger, Still Points both honors an important and influential artist and reveals new dimensions in his work.

Abstract:

Foreword by Ian W. Brown

In 1879 Edwin Curtiss set out for the wild St. Francis River region of northeastern Arkansas to collect archaeological specimens for the Peabody Museum. By the time Curtiss completed his fifty-six days of Arkansas fieldwork, he had sent nearly 1,000 pottery vessels to Cambridge and had put the Peabody on the map as the repository of one of the world’s finest collections of Mississippian artifacts. John House brings us a lively account of the work of this nineteenth-century fieldworker, the Native culture he explored, and the rich legacies left by both. The result is a vivid re-creation of the world of Indian peoples in the Mississippi River lowlands in the last centuries before European contact. The volume’s focus is Curtiss’s collection of charming and expressive effigy vessels: earthenware bowls and bottles that incorporate forms of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians, and humans, including the Peabody’s famous red-and-white head vase.

John H. House is Station Archaeologist, Pine Bluff Research Station, and Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

Abstract:

In the late 1950s, Chauncey C. Nash started collecting Inuit carvings just as the art of printmaking was being introduced in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), an Inuit community on Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. Nash donated some 300 prints and sculptures to Harvard’s Peabody Museum—one of the oldest collections of early modern Inuit art. The Peabody collection includes not only early Inuit sculpture but also many of the earliest prints on paper made by the women and men who helped propel Inuit art onto the world stage.

Author Maija M. Lutz draws from ethnology, archaeology, art history, and cultural studies to tell the story of a little-known collection that represents one of the most vibrant and experimental periods in the development of contemporary Inuit art. Lavishly illustrated, Hunters, Carvers, and Collectors presents numerous never-before-published gems, including carvings by the artists John Kavik, Johnniebo Ashevak, and Peter Qumalu POV Assappa. This latest contribution to the award-winning Peabody Museum Collections Series fills an important gap in the literature of Native American art.

Abstract:

Foreword by Rubie Watson

Photographs by Hillel S. Burger

1st place, 2006 NEMA Awards (Books Over $10)

Highlighting one of the Peabody Museum’s most important archaeological expeditions—the excavation of the Swarts Ranch Ruin in southwestern New Mexico by Harriet and Burton Cosgrove in the mid-1920s—Steven LeBlanc’s book features rare, never-before-published examples of Mimbres painted pottery, considered by many scholars to be the most unique of all the ancient art traditions of North America. Made between A.D. 1000 and 1150, these pottery bowls and jars depict birds, fish, insects, and mammals that the Mimbres encountered in their daily lives, portray mythical beings, and show humans participating in both ritual and everyday activities. LeBlanc traces the origins of the Mimbres people and what became of them, and he explores our present understanding of what the images mean and what scholars have learned about the Mimbres people in the 75 years since the Cosgroves’ expedition.

Steven A. LeBlanc is an archaeologist and former Director of Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Rubie Watson is Curator of Comparative Ethnology in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Abstract:

Peru’s ancient Moche culture is represented in a magnificent collection of artifacts at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. In this richly illustrated volume, Jeffrey Quilter presents a fascinating introduction to this intriguing culture and explores current thinking about Moche politics, history, society, and religion.

Quilter utilizes the Peabody’s collection as a means to investigate how the Moche used various media, particularly ceramics, to convey messages about their lives and beliefs. His presentation provides a critical examination and rethinking of many of the commonly held interpretations of Moche artifacts and their imagery, raising important issues of art production and its role in ancient and modern societies.

The most up-to-date monograph available on the Moche—and the first extensive discussion of the Peabody Museum’s collection of Moche ceramics—this volume provides an introduction for the general reader and contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions. Quilter’s fresh reading of Moche visual imagery raises new questions about the art and culture of ancient Peru.

Abstract:

Foreword by Robert Gardner
Essay by Bob Connolly

"Best Books 2013...The attraction of Dupont's books is that his photographs exhibit enormous passion and enthusiasm and are an effort to unlock the nature of the relationship between photographer and subject."
—THE Magazine

This publication records acclaimed Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) most important cultural and historical zones: the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville, and the capital city of Port Moresby. Through images and personal diaries, Dupont’s remarkable body of work captures the human spirit of the people of PNG in their transition from tribalism to globalization. The project was conducted in 2011 with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography given by Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.

Piksa Niugini consists of two hardcover books inside a special slipcase. The first volume is a collection of portraits in luscious duotone and 4-color reproduction; the second is a vibrant collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets, and documentary photographs that chronicle Dupont’s experience and working process and richly contextualize the more formal images in volume one. An exhibition of Dupont's New Guinea photographs is on display at the Peabody through September 2, 2013.

Dupont’s photographs have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into peoples, cultures, and communities that are under threat or in the process of rapid change. The photographer’s many awards include a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America, a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize, and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007 Dupont was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Aperture, Newsweek, GQ, French and German GEO, Le Figaro, Liberation, The Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Stern, Time, and Vanity Fair.

Abstract:

First Place, 2017 New England Book Show (General Trade, Illustrated)

First Place, 2017 NEMA Awards (Books)

Miki Kratsman has worked as a photojournalist in the Palestinian Occupied Territories for over three decades. Originally created in the context of daily news, his tens of thousands of photographs have, in retrospect, taken on fascinating new meanings, as bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details move to the center. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, the reimagined images ask us to explore the limits of the observer’s gaze under conditions of occupation.

Kratsman’s photographs look at both “wanted men”—individuals sought by the Israeli state—and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place, can be seen as a “suspect.” The work is both transgressive and banal, crossing boundaries between Israel and Palestine, “wanted” and “innocent,” street photography and surveillance imagery. Kratsman has also provoked vital, long-term interaction around the images on social media, creating a Facebook page on which viewers are invited to identify the individuals portrayed and comment on their “fate.” His complex project is chronicled in this book in more than 300 images that powerfully implicate the viewer as we follow the gaze of both occupier and occupied within a complex web of power relations around issues of life and death.

A thought-provoking text by Ariella Azoulay engages intimately with Kratsman’s images. Looking at various models of historical and civil construction of the gaze, Azoulay explores the ways in which the shadow of death is an actual threat that hovers over Kratsman’s photographed persons and frames both individuals and the borrowed time within which they exist.

A supplemental booklet contains hundreds of portraits and evocative messages from Kratsman’s Facebook proj

Abstract:

Peabody Museum Memoirs Volume 9, no. 1

Abstract:

Introduction by Gordon R. Willey
Appendixes by April K. Sievert and Fred Trembour

In this abundantly illustrated third and final volume on the artifacts found by Edward H. Thompson in the Well of Sacrifice, specialists analyze the great variety of objects and debate whether they represent evidence of dateable prehistorical ritual. The collection includes the rare remains of hundreds of textiles, wooden objects, and copal incense offerings that were preserved in the waters of this limestone sinkhole, as well as the lithics, ceramics and bone and shell artifacts commonly found in Maya burials and caches and about 250 mammalian remains. These objects are remarkable for having been cut, torn, broken, and burned before they were thrown into the green waters of the sacred well at Chichen Itza.

Abstract:

Peabody Museum Memoirs Volume 1, no. 2

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Peabody Museum Papers Volume 32, no. 3

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Peabody Museum Press Volume 1, no. 5

Abstract:

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 42, no. 2

(Report no. 6, Ramah Project)

Abstract:

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 48, no. 2

Abstract:

The 1968 excavation of the Neville Site in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a major event in the archaeological history of New England. Analysis of the site extended the known duration of continuous occupation in the region by some 3,000 years and demonstrated early connections between the New England area and the Southeast. The Neville Site was first occupied nearly 8,000 years ago, when the Eastern coastal plain from North Carolina to New Hampshire was essentially a single cultural province. Current excavations in Manchester have reinvigorated interest in the archaeology of New Hampshire and created a demand for this facsimile edition of the original 1976 publication.