Ch. 35: Native Arts of the Americas

Huitzilopochtli

A war and sun/fire deity. (Hummingbird of the South).

Ashlar Masonry

Carefully cut and regularly shaped blocks of stone used in construction, fitted together without mortar.

Coyolxauhqui

Coatlicue was also the mother of Coyolxauhqui (She of the Golden Bells, and 400 sons, the Centzon Huitznahua (Four Hundred Southerners), who, jealous that their mother was pregnant with Huitzilopochtli, banded together to murder her.

Superimposition

In Mesoamerican architecture, the erection of a new structure on top of, and incorporating, an earlier structure; the nesting of a series of buildings inside each other.

OTTO PENTEWA, Katsina figurine, Hopi, New Oraibi, Arizona, carved before 1959.

Katsinas are benevolent spirits living in mountains and water sources. This Hopi katsina represents a rain-bringing deity wearing a mask with geometric patterns symbolic of water and agricultural fertility.

MARÍA MONTOYA MARTÍNEZ, jar, San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, ca. 1939. Blackware, 11 1/8" X 1' 1". National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Hollachy).

Pottery is traditionally a Native American woman's art form. María Montoya Martínez won renown for her black-on-black vessels of striking shapes with matte designs on highly polished surfaces.

Tenochtitlan

The Aztec Empire was the dominant power in Mesoamerica in the centuries before Hernán Cortés overthrew it. Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), the Aztec capital with a population of more than 150,000, was a magnificent island city laid out on a grid plan. (Great Temple dedicated to the worship of Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc).

Aztec

The Aztecs were a Nahuatl-speaking people who left behind, in the Codex Mendoza and elsewhere, a history of their rise to power. Scholars have begun to question the accuracy of that Aztec account, however, and some think it is a mythic construct. According to the traditional history, the destruction of Toltec Tula about 1200 brought a century of anarchy to the Valley of Mexico, the vast highland valley 7,000 feet above sea level that is now home to sprawling Mexico City.

Inka

The Inka were a small highland group who established themselves in the Cuzco Valley around 1000. In the 15th century, however, they rapidly extended their power until their empire stretched from modern Quito, Ecuador, to central Chile. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the Inka Empire, although barely a century old, was the largest in the world.

Codex

The Mixteca-Puebla artists painted on long sheets of deerskin, which they first coated with fine white lime plaster and folded into accordion-like pleats to form codices (sing. codex) with covers of wood, mosaic, or feathers.

Ancestral Puebloan

The dominant culture of the American Southwest between 1300 and 1500 was the Ancestral Puebloan (formerly called the Anasazi), the builders of great architectural complexes such as Chaco Canyon and Cliff Palace.

Quetzalcoatl

The god of life, the black Quetzalcoatl (depicted here as a masked human rather than in the usual form of a feathered serpent), sits back-to-back with the god of death, the white Mictlantecuhtli.

Tlaloc

The rain and fertility god.

Mesoamerica

The region that comprises Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and the Pacific coast of El Salvador.

Coyolxauhqui (She of the Golden Bells), Aztec, from the Great Temple of Tenochtitlán, Mexico City, ca. 1469.

The sacrificed foes' bodies that the Aztecs hurled down the Great Temple's stairs landed on this disk, which depicts the segmented body of the moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui, Huitzilopochtli's sister.

Kiva

The spiritual center of Puebloan life (pueblo is Spanish for "urban settlement") was the kiva, or male council house, usually decorated with elaborate mural paintings representing deities associated with agricultural fertility.