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New World Figurine Project, Volume 2

Terry Stoker and Cynthia Otis Charlton (Editors), Provo, Utah: FARMS Research Press, 2000, softbound, 298 pages.

Otis Charlton explains that volume two of The New World Figurine Project "deals with figurine studies from the descriptive to the ethnographic."

The New World Figurine Project is the brainchild of Terry Stocker, who in the mid-1980s began to collect articles--new and classic--on ceramic figurines of North, Central and South America. Stocker's idea was to publish a comparative cross-section of articles throughout the New World; and he found a ready group of specialists to assist him.

The first volume was published in 1991, and it contained articles on figurines from the United States, Mexico, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Peru. This volume contains a dozen papers, including three classics and nine new articles.

The articles in this volume of figurine studies are on the Fremont, Adena-Hopewell, Mississippian, Olmec and Olmec-style, Late Postclassic Teotihuacan Valley, Anasazi, Pueblo, modern-day Karaja, and historic-period Paiute cultures. An article on thermo-luminescence dating and one on the messages communicated by figurines rounds out this very interesting collection.

Authors and article titles include Donald R. Tuohy's "The Virgin Anasazi Figurines from 'Lost City'"; Stuart D. Scott's "Pottery Figurines from Central Arizona"; Harry J. Shafer's "Clay Figurines from the Lower Pecos Region, Texas"; B. K. Swartz Jr.'s "Middle Woodland Figurines from the Mann Site, Southwest Indiana"; and Kevin E. Smith's "Human Figurines as Messengers Communicating with Past, Present, and Future Cultures.

The best thing, and I suspect this is what Stocker and his co-editor Cynthia Otis Charlton are aware of, are the photographs and drawings of the figurines. The variety of forms and faces and shapes and designs and constructions is really quite amazing, at least to this non-specialist. Figurines have always held an immense amount of cultural information that is not readily available in other archaeological material, everything from hair styles and clothing to a glimmer of an idea about what a culture considers sacred and profane. What this collection of articles does is open a window onto the current and past studies of figurines.

This book is specifically for researchers in the field of figurines, but researchers in any complex society would find it of interest.

Title: New World Figurine Project, Volume 2

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