Creations of the Rainbow Serpent: Polychrome Ceramic Designs from Ancient Panama

This volume brings a fresh perspective to the multicolored Coclé ceramic wares excavated at Sitio Conte in central Panama during the 1930s. The Coclé culture was a hierarchical and centralized society that flourished about a thousand years ago. Many of these ceramic wares were unearthed in caches and burials of elite figures. Coclé artists decorated their ceramics with a combination of geometrical forms and lively, graphic depictions of curious birds and beasts. Helms sees in these polychromes a semiotic code expressing sociological and cosmological concepts of the Coclé culture. Individual chapters explore chromatics, serpents, mammals, birds and fowl, body parts and processes, the tree of life, and other themes. This volume is handsomely illustrated with black-and-white and color plates and dozens of line drawings.