Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600-800: A Poetics of Line. By Adam Herring. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 316. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00 cloth.
Like Adam Herring, the author of this fine first book, the reviewer trained at Yale. More than any other place, this was where an art history of Precolumbian imagery became possible. By sheer chance, the university had hired people such as George Kubler, Floyd Lounsbury, and Michael Coe. There was no grand plan. Kubler secured his position as a specialist in colonial and hispanic productions; ' Lounsbury was renowned for his impeccable scholarship on kinship and Iroquoian languages, Coe as an early researcher on the New World "neolithic." Gradually, all shifted emphasis, at least in part, to Precolumbian and, more relevant here, Mesoamerican imagery and writing. They helped define the field, attracting graduate students and, in the case of Herring's professor, Mary Miller, a worthy, eventual successor to Kubler.