Pre-Columbian Designs from Panama

For decades, since its discovery, the strange minor culture of Coclé in Panama has held an unusual position for archeologists and art historians. Small in area, fairly recent in date, weak in many of the higher attributes of Mesoamerican civilization, Coclé is well-known for a ceramic style of remarkably high quality-a style that can bear comparison with similar products of the great civilizations of pre-Columbian America. The artist-ceramists of Coclé worked within a relatively narrow scope, mostly painting bowls for ceremonial use, but this painting emerges as one of the most imaginative art forms in the Americas, with countless new and powerful versions of general motifs that run through the native civilizations. Included on Coclé vessels are beautifully composed polychrome stylizations of gods and men, birds, crabs, serpents, jaguars, demons, monsters, and a host of geometric and abstract patterns. The designs are all styled in the same convention, so that they offer a consistent body of art that is unique: there is nothing else quite like them. The present volume contains more than 500 illustrations of this Coclé ceramic style, each strongly reproduced in black and white, but with indications for the original rich colors. They constitute most of the illustrations for a classic of American archeology, Coclé: An Archaeological Study of Central Panama by Samuel K. Lothrop. Today these Coclé illustrations are highly prized by modern ceramists, leather-workers, textile workers, graphic artists and others who prize strong, sophisticated, fantastic design.