The New World Figurine Project

Terry Stocker and Cynthia L. Otis Charlton, editors. 2001. Research Press at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. 288 pp; 12 chapters and an introduction; bibliography for each chapter.

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, new this year, contains a dozen papers, including three classics and nine new articles.

The articles collected in this volume include figurine studies from 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.

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