5.1 Interactions Within and Across Cultures in Indigenous American Art

The CED splits this unit in two. Ancient America means works made before about 1550 south of today's U.S.–Mexico border, in Mesoamerica (Olmec, Maya, Mexica) and the Andes (Chavín, Inka). Native North America means cultures north of that border, from ancient times to today, grouped into regions like the Southwest, Plains, Northwest Coast and Eastern Woodlands.

Contact with Europeans did not end these traditions. New materials such as glass beads and cloth, and new subjects such as the horse (brought by the Spanish), became part of them. The CED's point is that there is no single, frozen, 'authentic' Native art: tradition keeps changing.

Mesa Verde cliff dwellings (Montezuma County, Colorado; Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi); 450–1300 CE; sandstone). For centuries people farmed on top of the mesa and lived in pithouses, then in above-ground villages. In the late 1100s and 1200s many moved into villages tucked under cliff overhangs. Cliff Palace, the largest, has about 150 rooms and 23 kivas. A kiva is a round, sunken room used for ceremonies and gatherings; its roof doubled as open plaza space. Walls are shaped sandstone blocks set in mud mortar, plastered and sometimes painted. The south-facing alcoves catch low winter sun but are shaded in summer. By about 1300, after a long drought and other pressures, people moved south, and many present-day Pueblo communities trace their ancestry to this region. 'Anasazi' comes from Navajo, and many Pueblo people prefer 'Ancestral Puebloan.'

City of Machu Picchu (central highlands, Peru; Inka; c. 1450–1540 CE; granite). Most scholars think it was a royal estate built for the ruler Pachacuti. It sits on a ridge about 2,430 m (7,970 ft) up, above the Urubamba River, with terraces for farming stepping down the slopes. The builders carved and fitted the site's own granite. The Torreón, or 'observatory,' is a curved tower whose window lines up with sunrise on the June solstice. The Intihuatana Stone, often translated 'hitching post of the sun,' is a bedrock outcrop carved into planes and angles that echo the mountains around it. The Spanish never found the site; local Quechua farmers knew it long before Hiram Bingham publicized it in 1911.

Yaxchilán (Chiapas, Mexico; Maya; 725 CE; limestone architectural complex). This Maya city sits in a loop of the Usumacinta River, with temples on terraces rising into the hills. Its kings competed with nearby cities such as Piedras Negras, and they used carved inscriptions and images to prove their right to rule.

Structure 23 was built for Lady K'abal Xook, a principal wife of the king Shield Jaguar (Itzamnaaj Bahlam III, ruled 681–742). Carved limestone lintels (the horizontal stone beams over doorways) show her in royal ritual. On Lintel 24 the king holds a torch while she pulls a thorn-lined rope through her tongue; this bloodletting ritual offered royal blood to the gods. On Lintel 25 she kneels before a huge vision serpent rising from a bowl of burning, blood-spattered paper; an armed warrior, often identified as a royal ancestor, emerges from its jaws. The inscription ties the scene to Shield Jaguar's accession in 681. Showing a woman so prominently was unusual and stressed her family's importance to his claim.

Structure 33 was built by his son Bird Jaguar IV around the 750s, on a high terrace with a tall roof comb (a decorative stone crest) and a carved stairway. Structure 40 is another temple on the high ground above the plaza. Lintels 24 and 25 are now in the British Museum, removed in the 1880s.

Bandolier bag (Lenape (Delaware tribe, Eastern Woodlands); c. 1850 CE; beadwork on leather). Worn across the chest from shoulder to hip, bags like this were made by women and worn by men at ceremonies as signs of status. Earlier decoration used dyed porcupine quills; glass seed beads from European traders took over in the 1800s. The bag's shape echoes European soldiers' shoulder pouches, and its curving plant forms blend with older Native motifs. It was made after the Lenape had been pushed from their homelands around the Delaware River west through several moves, toward Kansas and later Oklahoma. The beads were imported, but the art form became distinctly Native.

Painted elk hide (attributed to Cotsiogo (Cadzi Cody); Eastern Shoshone, Wind River Reservation, Wyoming; c. 1890–1900 CE; painted elk hide). At the center, men in feathered dance regalia circle the Sun Dance poles, where a buffalo head waits to be raised with an eagle above it. Scholars note that Cotsiogo seems to have blended the Sun Dance with the Wolf Dance, a dance officials allowed. Around the edge, riders on horseback hunt buffalo. When it was painted, the buffalo herds had been nearly wiped out and the U.S. government had banned the Sun Dance. Cotsiogo sold painted hides to tourists visiting the reservation, so the hide records a pre-reservation way of life for outside buyers while helping its maker earn a living.