South American Art

MOTTA, ANA PAULA; ROMERO VILLANUEVA, GUADALUPE

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (2nd Edition)

Springer Nature

Año: 2020; p. 2914 - 2940

This chapter offers a geographical and cultural overview of South American Prehispanic Art. This region extends over 17,800,000 km2 and includes twelve countries. It is characterized by a series of distinctive features that contributes to its geographical and cultural diversity. Regarding art forms, the review includes rock art (pictographs and petroglyphs), mobile or portable art (decorated artefacts, ceramics, sculpted objects), and body art (body paintings and tattoos). An extensive review of the art forms covered in this paper is provided for four regions (1: Northern South America, the Guianas, and Amazonia; 2: Andes; 3: Chaco; and 4: Patagonia and Pampa) and chronologically presented covering the Pleistocene/Holocene Transition, Early Holocene, Middle Holocene, and Late Holocene, where applicable. The chapter focused on providing the reader with a general overview of South America?s art diversity and its chronological contextualization. Despite this diversity, some general traits support the idea of a wider regional identity. Regardless of present political boundaries between countries, art traditions extend across large areas, intersecting countries. However, not all research trajectories across South American countries were the same. This led to different degrees of development of archaeological research, with some countries advancing archaeological investigations and surveys early on. Therefore, many regions have been understudied, whereas others have benefitted from many decades of institutionally based and theoretically driven investigations, which resulted in deep time chronologies and understanding of art production.