Pre-Columbian art, so named because it
occurs before the arrival of Columbus.
Before embarking on recorded history and
the ancient civilizations of Egypt and
Mesopotamia, I'd like to look at the very
beginnings of the agricultural
revolution, before the division of labor
quickly accelerated into warring
city-states competing for limited
resources. One of the themes of the next
section on pre-Columbian art is on the
relationship between man and nature, and
I particularly like this quote from the
explorer and pioneer ecologist Thor
Heyerdahl.
It's a paraphrase of the idea from E.F.
Schumacher that to talk of a battle with
nature is already to have lost the war,
that only by understanding our place
in nature can we achieve the well-being
so vital to our species. So as we move
from the Neolithic into what we would
start to recognize as a civilization,
where the agricultural revolution brings
the accompanying awareness of the
importance of the heavens and predicting
the seasons and increase in the
organization of time through the
development of the calendar. The
agricultural revolution is the turn away
from hunter-gathering to deliberate and
selective cultivation of crops and
(subject to harvest) a permanent food
source more importantly, as said, this
leaves large swathes of the population
free to divide labour into the creation
of artifacts and art. It allowed the
building of permanent dwellings and
other constructions and in some cases
walled cities, the first being the eighth
century Catal Huyuk in modern-day
Turkey. However, taking the geographical
definition of Europe of the Azores to
the Urals I wanted to get away from the
Euro-centric focus that an art-history
dominated by Western art has, to look at
the art and civilization of the people
who crossed the Bering Straits between
Russia and Alaska in the last ice age
15,000 to 12,000 years ago,
and gradually colonised the Americas. The abundance of the
great American Plains sustained the
nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. The
first civilizations were further south.
Looking at a time line by area of
Central and South America we can see
that the first significant civilization
was the Olmecs, corresponding roughly
with the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. Since
this culture begins a chronology which
developed into the most significant
city-states of the Americas, namely the
Mayans and the Aztecs we'll come back to
this area in a while, but we'll start
with South America first, to gain insight
into post-agricultural but pre-civilized
society and I would stress here that I'm
using the term in its literal sense of a
society before the creation of cities.
'Civilization' also connotes qualities of
complex collective belief systems of a
shared sense of community dedicated to
philosophical inquiry and elements of
these can be found at the San Agustin
societies that we're about to look at,
and also let's remember that Mohandas
Gandhi when asked for his opinion of
Western civilization said with disdain
that he thought "it would be a good idea."
So just to place these cultures
geographically, the Olmecs here on the
northern coast of Mexico, the Aztecs
across the Yucatan Peninsula,
the Mayans down into Central America,
modern-day Guatemala, but here on the
Bolivian altiplano, before climatic
change bought agricultural catastrophe,
the first civilizations formed in the
Americas. The Altiplano or the high plain
is a huge plateau, in some places at
4,000 meters above sea level and it's
incredibly dry today, but three millennia
ago could sustain agriculture. The
climatic changes we see in this
millennium were due to precession or a
rotation in the tilt of the axis of the
earth which results in weather systems
moving. It's not comparable to today's
global warming due to Co2 levels, and far
be it for me to try and write history
before it's happened, but it
will be informative to look at
civilizations in the past, that because
of changing weather systems have
collapsed, but our story starts here in
Colombia. (There may be mosquitoes...) We're
going to look at the societies of San
Agustin high up in the valley of the Rio
Magdalena, seemingly an entirely
different river from where it becomes
the waterway of the 'narcotraficantes' and 'paramilitares' in the north,
and it's here that we can find one of the most significant artistic cultures
of its kind. Unfortunately as is the case
with much archaeology
much has perished: no feathered or wooden
artifacts remain, but gold as does stone
endures, and we can see from artworks in
both media that the relationship with
nature of the tribal cultures in what is
modern-day Colombia was one of
interdependence, not only in the
agricultural sense but also in the sense
of the connectedness to and the
deification of the seasons, and in
spiritual terms. There are elements in
European culture of transcendental
nature, of the pagan green man, the
medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, in the
Enlightenment with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in
Romantic and some modernist poetry and
art when in cultures like the San
Agustin culture I mean indigenous
cultures surviving up to the present
century is the shamanistic religion an
atomistic of religion believing in the
complete interconnectedness of spirit
and nature hence the Shaymin religious
healer of the community was able to take
medicines and go into trances transform
themselves into synthesis of animal or
bird spirit and travel through the
kingdoms of earth water and sky the
culture in the Guatavita area north of
bogota whose leader the conquistador is
called el dorado for the practice of
covering him gold throne golden
artifacts into the lake
and although this lake has been
incredibly successful in keeping it
secrets the gold artworks that have been
recovered across the country tell as
much of the fascination with such
shamanic syntheses of spirits
from the animal kingdom my favorite is
this famous gold pictorial to be warm on
the chest which is a synthesis of the
head of the bat from the night kingdom
of the air and the body of the jaguar
from the night kingdom of the land I
call it the bagua unhelpfully and the
Museo Dora the museum of gold good
choice of name in Bogota also reveals
much of the shamanic culture the
alkaloid from the unprocessed leaves of
the plant Aerith rocks alum coca can be
released using lime either in the cheek
or using a pop bottom a mixing jar with
a dipper and it gives the recipient
transcendental feelings and also
endurance of energy Shaymin would use
this we're available in the highlands or
if not available
ayahuasca or Yage down in the Amazon
basin being another such healing plant
for the shame and to enter the spirit
world
these solid gold animals from the Museo
Dora a testament to the imagination and
craftsmanship with gold including
filigree that the pre-columbian cultures
had and to their deeply spiritual
relationship with nature higher up in
the Andes and centered on the Altiplano
of south of Lake Titicaca is the
birthplace of the wiry culture with its
advanced architecture it's much closer
then to being called a civilization
interesting for later Incas Lake
Titicaca was the birthplace of their
oldest deities the Sun and the moon the
air is particularly dry and the Milky
Way that was the pathway to the spirit
world of the Incas is visible to the
naked eye
Tiahuanaco was the capital of the
tihuanaco Empire preceding the wari
Empire that gave birth to the Inca and
on the most important archeological
monument in Bolivia the Puerta del Sol
is the image of their war god Viracocha
carrying a spear thrower and a staff I
became so fascinated by this image I
decided to carve it in gesso plaster
using a pointed steel file which took
several days you can appreciate that the
geometry of the thing is partly a result
of the difficulty of the stone carving
process but when you look at painted art
elsewhere in Mesoamerica you see that
the artists don't vary from this
abstract geometric approach in other
words that they found their aesthetic
expression in it and we'll return to
this idea when we look at a painting of
a female goddess from Teotihuacan in
Mexico the Puerta del Sol is a monolith
a single piece of stone although it's
now cracked it's thought to be a
calendar and again shows the importance
of the awareness of celestial motions in
agriculture and therefore survival and
through life and death comes religious
significance and human sacrifice a
mainstay of pre-columbian cultures
before leaving South America we should
look at the Nazca culture and its
zoomorphic designs in the coastal desert
of Peru made famous by the Swiss pseudo
archaeologist Erich von däniken the
lines were made by removing surface
stones to reveal under soil in lines
about 30 centimeters in width rather
like the white horses in Salisbury Plain
archaeologists disagree on the nature of
the lines and animals theories ranging
from representations of constellations
and equinoxes to markers for aquifer
water sources the both are connected to
agriculture and therefore religion
please analyze this image what do you
sing
try and remember try and memorize these
lines we'll see them again soon
this is a photo I took all the equally
famous referring to the Nazca lines
equally famous Machu Picchu at sunrise
and the link between interpretations of
and in visiting we talked about
pareidolia earlier and here a
neurological phenomena is raised to
religious significance we're looking at
faces of gods in the landscape and it's
documented in other places in the Inca
Empire for example in Cusco its capital
and here in Machu Picchu it seems
evident that the site was selected for
the appearance of the god quiner picture
that the Inca chose a place to settle
where the landscape was a deity and so
to Central America
