Search

El Maye is a community located in the municipality of Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, in the central region of Mexico. During the late Postclassic period (1350–1521 AD), the Aztecs controlled the area through the establishment of a dual-headed system, one part belonging to the Aztec government and the other to the local government. El Maye was the local government center for the Ixmiquilpan territory under the Aztec domain. The residential units of El Maye archaeological site were constructed in 6 different occupational phases, with the presence of large rooms, stucco floors and walls, offerings, and a variety of ceramics belonging to the late Aztec III ceramic period (1400–1520 AD). The Axis Project of the Mezquital Valley (PEVM-ENAH) and the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory (LEMA-UNAM) have undertaken a collaborative study of the El Maye site by performing absolute radiocarbon accelerator mass spectrometry (14C AMS) dating. For a better understanding of the emergence and development of El Maye, a series of AMS 14C dates of charcoal and bone samples recovered from different stratigraphic levels, was performed. This allowed us to locate the occupation of the site between 1320 and 1625 cal AD.

A bronze portrait of a child (figs. 1-4) belonging to the category of “small format” portraits is preserved in the Archaeological Museum of Badajoz (inv. no. 4471). It was found in 1970 in excavations conducted by J. M. Peralta y Sosa on a farm in the Vega del Ortiga, an area east of Medellín in the territory between that town and Don Benito (Lusitania), some 35 km from Mérida (Augusta Emerita). In the excavated area of 40 m2 (fig. 5) were two cisterns and a rectangular well, at the bottom of which was the bronze portrait. The N cistern measured 3.8 x 1.25 m. Attached to its E side was a rectangular (80 x 60 cm) well. A channel in the centre of the S wall of the well was connected to a square (3.45 x 2.9 m) cistern. From its W wall a drain leads into a channel towards the Ortiga river, which flows by some 50 m away. On the E side of the excavation area were two identical column bases which could have belonged to a peristyle. One is a square (90 x 80 cm) block preserving traces of a column shaft 65 cm in diameter, while the other, 3 m to the north, retains the beginning of the shaft. From this point a wall (45 cm thick) faced with stucco starts to head north. The pottery found during the excavation included Arretine, South Gaulish and thin-walled wares belonging to the first quarter of the 1st c. A.D. The site appears to have been part of a Roman villa.

This article builds upon Jan Białostocki's seminal bookThe Art of the Renaissance in Eastern Europeby examining two merchant palaces in the port city of Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula River in Poland but departs from his interpretation of them. Focusing on the stucco architecture and relief-sculpture of their façades, the article argues against Białostocki's traditional reading of imitation as being driven by artistic influence, and, through the study of the city's mercantile and pilgrimage context, it proposes instead that a notion of imitation that was deeply immersed in sophisticated practices of copying and reference making. It concludes that the merchant community in Kazimierz Dolny was aiming to forge a new civic identity in order to contend in a broader social, religious and economic realm that was traversed by merchants, travellers and pilgrims alike.

One early spring afternoon in 1982 I happened to find myself ambling along Fuzhou Road in Shanghai and coming by chance upon a small unattractive bookstore. The brown paint on its outer doors was peeling, the stucco surface of its exterior needed a good scrubbing, and more than a few tiles on its floor were broken. If then no different in appearance from the other bookstores I had earlier visited along this famous Shanghai book street, this store nonetheless boasted a strikingly different kind of stock: it specialized in selling second-hand Western books. While novels abounded on its shelves, the pre-war variety in hardback and the more recent in paperback, one thick non-fiction volume caught my eye. Entitled Domesday Book and Beyond, this classic 1887 treatment of early English history by the great English legal historian Frederic W. Maitland had long been on my reading list. Somehow a copy of it had ended up in this unpromising bookshop. When I opened the virtually virgin pages of this copy and noticed that it could be bought for a proverbial song, I readily leapt to the temptation and acquired it with delight.

Although cosmic tree symbolism among pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica traces from the Preclassic period, the underlying meaning of the motif and its symbolic permutations are poorly understood. Attempts to identify the plant in a botanical context on ceramic vessels, stucco reliefs, and stone stelae of lowland Maya attribution usually favor determinations as a kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra) or maize plant (Zea mays). A botanical assessment of the morphic and ecological characteristics of these motifs suggests, however, a white-flowered water lily of lowland swamps,Nymphaea ampla. Archeological remains at San Bartolo of the Petén indicate that these iconographic practices were established and codified to a certain extent by the first centuryb.c.The frequent identification of various gods and dynastic rulers as personifications of a water lily world tree underscores the crucial symbolic and ritualistic roles this plant once played in the practice of religion and kingship among Mayan civilizations.

In the Dublin Journal of 4 April 1769, Thomas Weston, recently arrived from London and ‘versed in the Stucco Art’, announced his proficiency in the ‘Antique Taste’, having worked ‘some Years under the Designs of Mess. Adams, Chambers and Stewart [sic]’. His timing was far from coincidental: less than a month earlier the premium for the design of the Royal Exchange in Dublin, awarded to the English architect Thomas Cooley, had been announced; the competition had generated no less than thirty-three British submissions (or 60% of the total number of competitors). Just as enlightened Irish architectural critics had deemed the employment of an English architect for this particular project as ‘too obvious to be insisted upon’, so it would appear that Weston had identified an opportunity to establish himself in Ireland as an unrivalled exponent of the Neoclassical style. Some weeks later, on 27 April, Weston amended his original advertisement to record that he had ‘served his Apprenticeship to Mr. Rose of London’.

Dr William Dumble’s house in Toronto (Figure 1) looked like many other middle-class homes constructed in North American urban centres in the early twentieth century. The twostorey, brick house with a hipped roof and dormer window was typical in its blocky massing, pronounced chimney, generous setback from the street, contrasting materials, and careful detailing. Such houses were intended to house a typical family: two parents, perhaps a few children, and maybe a servant or lodger. Even the way the architects Burke, Horwood andWhite drew the building’s facade—in soft pencil and red ink on tracing paper, showing the warm tone of the red brick and the rough texture of the stucco trim and manicured lawn—signalled domesticity. Both the house design and the architect's drawing, that is, were styled to appear friendly, inviting, and traditional. The house corresponds to the general type of domestic architecture built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a picturesque, non-classical, asymmetrical cottage ‘‘with diverse visual and tactile effects on the exterior and an integration between exterior form and inside spaces’’. Burke, Horwood and White’s floor plan of the house, however, reveals little integration between the front elevation and the spaces inside, which were much more commercial and scientific than the homey exterior suggested. Behind the bay window, to the right of the front door, was the physician’s office; across the hall, boasting white pine trim, oak borders, and a gas fireplace, was a waiting-room for patients. Indeed, nearly half of the ground floor area of the Dumble house was given over to his medical practice, with a close and direct connection to rooms presumably used by his family and live-in

During the seventeenth century East India Company merchants settled in several cities of western India under the control of the Mughal Empire. The most important of these was Surat in Gujarat, where an English cemetery of impressive brick and stucco tombs was established. The style and nature of these monuments provide an insight into the cultural interactions that took place between the English merchants and the local population, as well as indicating the political aspirations of the East India Company officials. A description of these tombs, the earliest dating to 1649, is followed by a discussion of the origins of the cemetery, the chronology of the tombs and the identity and status of the dead. It is shown how the adoption of Indo-Islamic architectural styles for the earliest tombs was modified during the eighteenth century by the increasing use of Western architectural features, in line with growing British political power in India during this period. Changing architectural styles are paralleled by the changing attitudes of British visitors to the tombs from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.

The decoration of Hellenistic houses can be understood in terms of hierarchies, which marked out the relative importance of the rooms and spaces in the house. In mosaics, the hierarchy is related to the materials used and the complexity of the design; wall painting is capable of expressing more subtle distinctions, through a combination of colours, motifs, decorative friezes, and architectural features in stucco relief. Surviving houses from Delos, Morgantina and Monte Iato are analysed in detail to explain how their decoration might have worked, and from these examples some conclusions are drawn about changes in the use of domestic space in the late Hellenistic period.

The Gurjara Pratīhāras have long been recognised as the leading royal house of northern India during the ninth and tenth centuries. A considerable number of copper plate and stone inscriptions have survived from Pratīhāra times and these have provided the requisite data for a reconstruction of the dynasty's political and social history. Following conventions established in the Gupta period if not before, the copper-plates of the Pratīhāras record grants of villages or land, while stone inscriptions typically recount the building of temples and the provision of gifts to enshrined divinities. A large number of temples from the Pratīhāra age have been preserved; some of these buildings have enjoyed the recent scholarly attention of the team working on the Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture as well as the Temple Survey of the Archaeological Survey of India. In contrast, palatial architecture is virtually unknown. This is neither surprising nor unusual, there being little left of such buildings in any part of India from before the fourteenth century. This is due to the wide use of perishable building materials, notably wood, brick and stucco. In the case of the Pratīhāra rulers there is also the fact that their capital city of Kannauj (anc. Kānyakubja) has been completely destroyed. That the Pratīhāras were responsible for some building at Kannauj is indicated by the inscription, dated Harṣa year 276 (A.D. 882–3), from the shrine of Garībnāth at Pehowa. This inscription records, among many other things, that a temple of Viṣṇu Garuḍāsana was built by the Brāhmaṇa Bhūvaka on the banks of the river Gaṅgā in Bhojapura near Kānyakubja.

The Feathered Serpent Pyramid (Temple of Quetzalcoatl) was built in a single episode involving the sacrifice of around 200 individuals, in Miccaotli or Early Tlamimilolpa times. Most were males with military gear. Many had shell collars with pendants of imitation human jaws made of worked shell teeth set in stucco; rarely were real jaws used. At the center, 20 individuals (probably all males) were buried with very rich offerings including greenstone beads, earspools, nose pendants, figurines, and strange conical objects; obsidian blades and figurines; shells; and remains of wood and probable textiles. We also explored a looters' tunnel that had severely disturbed two large pits under the pyramid; in one of these an individual of exceptional importance may have been buried. Preliminary analysis of material from tests in the platform that later obscured the front of the pyramid suggests that it may have been built as much as two centuries after the pyramid. It covered another large pit associated with the pyramid, also looted.

In my earlier paper on the ‘Stanze di Venere’ (written in 1973), I referred to the progressive deterioration of the stucco and other decorations in the Roman remains at Baia. The following pages are an attempt to provide a full record of the Baian stucco-work not covered in the first article. The idea of compiling this record originated with Dottssa. Maria Elena Bertoldi and received the full support of Prof. Alfonso De Franciscis; while the actual drawings were begun in 1973 by Miss Shelagh Rixon and completed, with further visits to the site for checking in 1974 and 1975, by Dr. Lesley A. Ling. To all of these and to our sponsors (the University of Manchester and the Faculty of Classics in the University of Cambridge) I am deeply indebted. Since the drawings were completed, the task of studying stucco decoration in Roman Italy has been greatly simplified by the pioneer-work of Dr. Harald Mielsch of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, who has compiled a major corpus of surviving material and attempted to establish a detailed chronology. It only remains for me to provide a commentary on the drawings, to discuss the architectural contexts, and to enlarge upon or modify Dr. Mielsch's conclusions regarding the Baian stucco-work. The various decorations will be dealt with one by one, and the positions of all but two of them are shown on Fig. 1, which has been adapted, by kind permission of Dottssa. Bertoldi, from one of the plans executed for her volume in the Forma Italiae series.

PITTURE E STUCCHI ROMANI NEL VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUMViene qui pubblicata una serie de affreschi e di stucchi romani conservati nel Victoria and Albert Museum di Londra. La provenienza, secondo il catalogo del Prints and Drawings Department, é Pozzuoli; ed uno dei due stucchi appartiene con molta probabilità allo stesso contesto della serie pozzolana del British Museum pubblicata nel 1966. Gli affreschi, a parte un frammento del secondo stile pompeiano e due pezzi a campo giallo, provengono probabilmente da una sola decorazione, forse funeraria, dell' epoca flavio-traianea. L'iconografia comprende uccelli, frutta, gorgoneia, capre, personificazioni delle stagioni, amoretti, e (motivi di un interesse particolare) due demoni alati che rassomigliano al demone etrusco Charun.

SummaryExamination of the account books and other papers, now chiefly deposited in the Record Office of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, has enabled a chronology to be prepared of the long-drawn-out construction and decoration of the eighteenth-century west range of Stoneleigh Abbey. The contributions of the four architects principally involved—Francis and William Smith, William Hiorn and Timothy Lightoler—have been assessed, together with those of the more prominent craftsmen. In particular, the process by which the hall (or saloon) achieved its final form in 1763-5 is explored and suggestions made about the authorship of its remarkable stucco decoration.

In 1956 the British Museum acquired on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum a series of eighteen stucco reliefs of the kind used by the Romans in the interior decoration of walls and vaults: these were bought in 1078, together with a terracotta relief, and were all ascribed to a ‘Greek tomb of the second century B.C. lately discovered in South Italy.’ They appear as follows in the British Museum Register of Antiquities:1. In relief foreparts of Griffin facing right, ending in short twisted tail. Background painted red. 35 × 39·5 cm.2. In relief foreparts of panther facing left, ending in short twisted tail. Background painted red. 35 × 38·8 cm.3. In relief ‘putto’ moving left holding a patera (?) in his right hand and tambourine in left hand. Overhead hanging swags. 47·7 × 35 cm.4. ‘Putto’ flying to right holding a lyre in right hand. Overhead hanging swags. 49·6 × 35·6 cm.5. In relief a winged Victory moving lightly to right. 48·3 × 34·4 cm.6. In relief ‘putto’ running to right, over his left arm a small piece of drapery. Overhead hanging swags. 48·3 × 39·5 cm.7. Concave and framed with leaf-tongue moulding. In relief ‘putto’ riding a sea-horse. 30·5 × 39·5 cm.8. Concave and framed by leaf-tongue moulding. In relief ‘putto’ riding sea-monster. 31·2 × 43·9 cm.9. In relief half-reclining semi-nude female figure, probably Venus. 30·5 × 37·6 cm.10. Concave, framed by leaf-moulding. In relief ‘putto’ on back of panther prancing to left. 31·8 × 34·4 cm.11. In relief, griffin prancing to left. 28 × 33·1 cm.

The Palace at Mycenae was first found and excavated by Tsountas in 1886, although Schliemann had previously in 1874 dug one or two trial pits on the summit of the Acropolis here. His shafts are shewn on Steffen's excellent plan. Tsountas published a full report of his excavations in the Πρακτικά, and in succeeding campaigns cleared more of the ruins of the Palace, and also laid bare the foundations of the Doric temple which was built over the ruins of the Palace in later times. Unfortunately, no full account or plan of these supplementary excavations has ever been published, so that our knowledge of the Palace at Mycenae was incomplete. In 1914 Dr. Rodenwaldt re-examined the painted stucco floors in the Court and in the Megaron, and at the same time republished, together with important new fragments which he was lucky enough to find, all the known pieces of wall-painting from the Megaron. We began work on the Palace in 1920, and continued our re-investigation of the ruins during the three following campaigns, of which that of 1923 was very short. The results of our observations and the few new points discovered by us are here set out. We have to thank Dr. Leicester Holland for the splendid plan published here (Plate II.). In it all the foundation walls of the Doric temple are omitted and most of the Hellenistic and other late walls, so as not to confuse the plan of the Mycenaean Palace.

My remarks about the Mithraeum at Capua in J.H.S. 1925, p. 100, require correction in view of Professor Minto's excellent publication of his discovery in Notizie degli scavi, 1924, p. 353 ff. It is not true that ‘the initiate … appears to be represented as a child, not as a man.’ In the stucco decorations of the podia the initiate is in fact represented as smaller than the mystagogue and the officiating priest (see figures 10–15 in Minto's article). It is possible that the officiants were supposed to act the parts of divine personages and were therefore represented as larger than human in accordance with a common artistic convention. In any case there is in the stuccos no additional evidence for Mithraic belief in the rebirth of the initiate as a child.

Fifty years ago, when Miss E. L. Wadsworth (Mrs. H. F. Cleland) wrote her monograph on Roman stucco reliefs, still the basic study of the subject, the earliest decorations that she examined in detail were those of a house discovered in the grounds of the Villa Farnesina in Rome. These stuccoes, which have been dated (with a precision perhaps unduly optimistic) to 19 B.C., are generally acknowledged to be among the masterpieces of their medium. From the vaults of three small cubicula come a large number of fragments showing a system of long borders and interlocking rectilinear panels, all framed by shallow mouldings and containing reliefs of great delicacy, of which the most important are landscapes, Dionysiac scenes, Victories, busts, grotesques and floral motifs (cf. Fig. 7, p. 52 and Plates I, a; II, a and b). Unpublished pieces of stucco-work from other vaults in the house repeat the same formula; and all attest the presence of artists of consummate skill and of an art-form which is technically perfect.Such work represents the culmination of a development, rather than its beginning. Miss Wadsworth was of course aware of this: indeed, she knew of at least one earlier set of decorations, the stuccoes of the Casa dei Grifi on the Palatine, and was only prevented from treating them in full by the fact that they were awaiting a definitive publication. But the general paucity of earlier material forced her to give short shrift to Republican stucco-work and to consign its origins to the realm of conjecture. She suggested that stucco reliefs first appeared in Italy at the time of Sulla, that they originated in Alexandria, and that they were introduced by way of Campania.

SummaryCylindrical objects lying on their sides appear in a number of paintings and stucco reliefs in Roman Italy, and can be divided into three groups: those which serve as seats for actors in figure-scenes, those which appear amid groups of inanimate objects, and those which are provided with attachments resembling the handles of garden-rollers. (A full catalogue of known examples is given, not only in paintings and stuccoes, but also in other media.) Previous writers have tended to seek an all-embracing explanation, however fantastic, for these cylinders; but it is better to consider the groups separately. The first group are probably discarded column-drums, and the other two are probably rollers employed for preparing palaestra-surfaces (though, in origin, they too may be column-drums). The roller, unlike the simple column-drum, seems to have enjoyed only a temporary vogue as an artistic motif, and to have been confined to minor decorative work in the cities of Campania.

ABOUT twenty-five miles to the south of Madrid, lying among the soft rolling hills of the table-land of Castile and surrounded by lands weary of cultivation, lies Valdemoro, a small, picturesque village of only 3,000 inhabitants. Today its main riches lie in the exploiting of gypsum (yeso), and the material from which stucco is made (escayola), both of which are sent to Madrid to be sold. Cultivation of the land succeeds only in producing the bare necessities of life to maintain the sparse population, and does not afford sufficient occupation for the inhabitants. Many of the townsfolk are forced to seek their sustenance by working in the capital city or by emigration to other parts.

In the month of February 1818, some labourers rooting up an old ash-tree in a field called Sarendells, in the parish of Great Witcombe, in the county of Gloucester, discovered a large hewn stone about six feet in length; on the removal of which, it appeared to have rested upon two other large upright stones. Sir William Hicks, Bart. of Witcombe Park, the proprietor of the ground, immediately gave directions that the earth should be removed, in order to pursue the discovery, when it was ascertained that each of the two upright stones was six feet two inches in height; and that they formed a door-way leading into a room 19 feet 7½ inches by 13 feet 7 inches, (No. 1 in the annexed plan, Pl. XIV.) the walls of which remained in a very perfect state, to the height of from five feet four inches to six feet. When first opened they were covered with a coat of stucco two inches thick, painted in pannels of different colours. The greater part of this soon fell off in consequence of the continual rains which immediately followed the discovery.

On the 21st of April, 1917, the embankment of the Rome-Naples railway gave way a short distance outside the Porta Maggiore: the works undertaken to repair the damage led to the discovery of a subterranean building of the greatest interest. One may say, without fear of exaggeration, that this is one of the most important discoveries ever made in Rome, and it raises a formidable number of problems archaeological, historical and artistic. It is impossible in a brief article to describe the building fully or to attempt an interpretation of the stucco reliefs that decorate it, especially as it has not yet been published in detail. I will therefore, in this short study, merely point out some of its most important characteristics and summarize the result of recent studies.

HE INITIAL paper in this series (Littmann 1957, AMERICAN ANTIQUITY, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 135-40) presented a systematic approach to the study of ancient building elements such as mortars, plasters, and stuccos, and set forth the bases upon which the work was undertaken. It also included studies on steps of the prebrick period of Temple IV at Comalcalco, Tabasco, Mexico, in which it was demonstrated that a building unit comprising a monolithic limeaggregate structure covered with a thin, limebased wash coat followed by a thicker coat of plaster was used. Such a unit appeared to have been used in both the original structure and subsequent additions or modifications throughout the prebrick period. The earlier work has now been extended to include mortars and plasters of the brick period, obtained from the sanctuary of Temple IV and the Palace, and stucco from Temple IV. The methods of analysis used are those described in the earlier publication. On-site Observations and Sampling. Mortar and plaster samples were taken from newly excavated areas and were removed from the structure with a knife blade or chisel. In most cases, unbroken samples of plaster as large as 10 by 10 cm. could be obtained. By careful manipulation, mortar samples as large as 3 by 10 cm. could be pried from the spaces between bricks. The samples of stucco were picked up from the area where they had fallen to the floor of the sanctuary as a result of the collapse of the upper part of the structure. Preliminary examinations of the samples disclosed no unusual features of structure or composition, though later and more detailed examinations showed the initial observations to be in error. All samples had, superficially, a gray, limey appearance and tended to dust moderately upon handling. The mortars and plasters, including the floor of the sanctuary, showed no evidence of lamination or the use of a unit type of construction as observed in the case of the steps of Temple IV. The samples described in detail below have been assigned analytical numbers which are in sequence with those used in the initial paper. For future reference, it should be noted that an individual series of analytical numbers will be used for each site studied.

Every visitor to the temple of Luxor is familiar with the central hall that is described by all the leading authorities as a Christian church, adapted from a Pharaonic building of the time of Amenophis III. The date of the original building is given by the magnificent series of bas-reliefs on the walls, most of which have been revealed from beneath a thick coating of plaster, on the remaining parts of which can still be seen traces of late antique paintings. It is, in the main, these paintings that have attracted the attention of scholars, both of those who saw them immediately after excavation and of those who, since then, have deplored their almost total destruction at the hands of the Egyptologists, who stripped off the greater part of the stucco to reveal the underlying Egyptian sculpture. Somers Clarke had good reason to protest: ‘We may admit that for the purposes of a complete study of the excellent wall sculptures it was necessary to remove these paintings: but it was a piece of unscientific barbarism to break them up without even procuring careful copies.’

‘In Stymphalos there is also an old sanctuary of Stymphalian Artemis. The image is of wood, mostly gilded. On the roof of the temple there are also representations of the Stymphalian birds. It was difficult to discern clearly whether they were made of wood or plaster, but my examination suggested that they were of wood rather than plaster.’Pausanias' reference to the Stymphalian birds of the temple at Stymphalos was taken by the German scholar, Bliimner, to indicate that stucco reliefs were produced by the Greeks; and, despite the caution of Miss E. L. Wadsworth, 3 the inference that plaster was used for architectural sculptures of some form in Classical (or even pre-Classical) Greece has clearly been accepted by M. Cagiano de Azevedo and N. Bonacasa in the two great Italian encyclopedias of art.