VEILED BRIGHTNESS: A HISTORY OF ANCIENT MAYA COLOR
by Stephen Houston, Claudia Brittenham, Cassandra Mesick, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Christina Warinner
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, 2009
$40.20 with website order discount
Description from the UT Press catalog:
Color is an integral part of human experience, so common as to be overlooked or treated as unimportant. Yet color is both unavoidable and varied. Each culture classifies, understands, and uses it in different and often surprising ways, posing particular challenges to those who study color from long-ago times and places far distant. Veiled Brightness reconstructs what color meant to the ancient Maya, a set of linked peoples and societies who flourished in and around the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and Central America. By using insights from archaeology, linguistics, art history, and conservation, the book charts over two millennia of color use in a region celebrated for its aesthetic refinement and high degree of craftsmanship.
The full description and order details are now on the UT Press on-line catalog.
This book looks amazing! I can’t wait to add it to my collection. I remember a talk Steve Houston gave on this very subject a couple of years ago at the Beckman. Nice to see it has finally materialized into a book and I look forward to reading it.