Visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas
Visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas
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Visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas

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Visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the visual artistic practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from ancient times to the present. These include works from South America and North America, which includes Central America and Greenland. The Siberian Yupiit, who have great cultural overlap with Native Alaskan Yupiit, are also included.

Indigenous American visual arts include portable arts, such as painting, basketry, textiles, or photography, as well as monumental works, such as architecture, land art, public sculpture, or murals. Some Indigenous art forms coincide with Western art forms; however, some, such as porcupine quillwork or birchbark biting are unique to the Americas.

Indigenous art of the Americas has been collected by Europeans since sustained contact in 1492 and joined collections in cabinets of curiosities and early museums. More conservative Western art museums have classified Indigenous art of the Americas within arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with precontact artwork classified as pre-Columbian art, a term that sometimes refers to only precontact art by Indigenous peoples of Latin America. Native scholars and allies are striving to have Indigenous art understood and interpreted from Indigenous perspectives.

The Lithic stage or Paleo-Indian period is defined as approximately 18,000 to 8,000 BCE. The period from around 8000 to 800 BCE is generally referred to as the Archaic period. While people of this time period worked in a wide range of materials, perishable materials, such as plant fibers or hides, had seldom been preserved through the millennia. Indigenous peoples created bannerstones, Projectile point, Lithic reduction styles, and pictographic cave paintings, some of which have survived in the present.

Belonging in the lithic stage, the oldest known art in the Americas is a fossilized megafauna bone, possibly from a mammoth, carved with a profile of walking mammoth or mastodon that dates back to 11,000 BCE. The bone was found early in the 21st century near Vero Beach, Florida, in an area where human bones (Vero man) had been found in association with extinct pleistocene animals early in the 20th century. The bone is too mineralized to be dated, but the carving has been authenticated as having been made before the bone became mineralized. The anatomical correctness of the carving and the heavy mineralization of the bone indicate that the carving was made while mammoths and/or mastodons still lived in the area, more than 10,000 years ago.

The oldest known painted object in North America is the Cooper Bison Skull from approximately 8,050 BCE.[page needed] Lithic age art in South America includes Monte Alegre culture rock paintings created at Caverna da Pedra Pintada dating back to 9250 to 8550 BCE. Guitarrero Cave in Peru has the earliest known textiles in South America, dating to 8000 BCE.

The southwestern United States and certain regions of the Andes have the highest concentration of pictographs (painted images) and Petroglyphs (carved images) from this period. Both pictographs and petroglyphs are known as rock art.

The Yup'ik of Alaska have a long tradition of carving masks for use in shamanic rituals. Indigenous peoples of the Canadian arctic have produced objects that could be classified as art since the time of the Dorset culture. While the walrus ivory carvings of the Dorset were primarily ceremonial, the art of the Thule people who replaced them circa 1000 CE was more decorative in character.

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