Images in Action: The Southern Andean Iconographic Series. WILLIAM H. ISBELL, MAURICIO I. URIBE, ANNE TIBALLI, and EDWARD P. ZEGARRA, editors. 2018. UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles. 801 pp. + illustrations. $139.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-938770-14-2 .

Images in Action: The Southern Andean Iconographic Series. WILLIAM H. ISBELL, MAURICIO I. URIBE, ANNE TIBALLI, and EDWARD P. ZEGARRA, editors. 2018. UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles. 801 pp. + illustrations. $139.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-938770-14-2.

For more than a century, the iconography of the Southern Andes—a geographical setting of rugged highlands, extensive mesetas, glacier mountains, deserts, and tropical forests—during the first millennium AD has attracted public and scholarly interest to the archaeology of that region and has contributed to placing that field of research in an outstanding position within precolumbian studies. This volume—edited by William H. Isbell, Mauricio I. Uribe, Anne Tiballi, and Edward P. Zegarra—is the outcome of a colloquium held in Santiago de Chile that focused on the visual culture associated with the Tiwanaku style, designated in this book as the Southern Andean Iconographic Series (SAIS). The long-term development of those stylistic and artistic expressions contributed to establishing a profound relationship among the Titicaca Basin (the center of Tiwanaku society), the central and southern parts of Peru, northern Chile, the eastern valleys of Bolivia, and the northwest sierra of Argentina—a geographic space comparable not only in extension and ecological complexity but also in its sociocultural articulation to Mesoamerica, the Aegean, or Mesopotamia.

The creation and appropriation of images occur in a continuous process of elaborating values and meanings usually entangled with the construction of hierarchies and senses of social belonging and exclusion. Furthermore, the forms of shared ideologies or festive communality transmitted by the icons may serve to hide political and socioeconomic disparities. In the introductory chapter of the book, Isbell examines the features that help define a history and an ethos that were progressively shared by different polities. From this point of departure, the first section of this richly illustrated volume examines the early part of the SAIS. The origins of iconography in the Yaya-Mama Tradition (900–200 BC) from the Titicaca area are treated in the first two chapters. Sergio Chavez, in Chapter 2, reviews his decades-long work in the basin and discusses two Yaya-Mama characters: Woman with Alpaca and Feline Man. The site of Pukara, on the north side of the lake and a potential rival or partner of an incipient Tiwanaku site, is explored in Chapter 3...