Jackson State University Assistant Art Professor Dr. Yumi Park Huntington lectured recently at Princeton University on Andean pre-Columbian ceramics.
An art history teacher, Huntington is compiling, writing and editing an upcoming book on the subject, to be titled “Pre-Columbian Ceramics: A Thematic Approach.”
Her study is the only one of its type in the United States, she said, looking at utilitarian objects from the archeology of the Andean region and cataloging them from the standpoint of social stratification, religious practices and the makers’ ethnicity.
“We are able to analyze their lives by studying this,” she said.
Huntington’s Nov. 4 talk at Princeton was titled “Engraved Head Motifs on Cupisnique Ceramics: Emblems of Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in Early Andean Art.”
The term “Cupisnique (coop-is-NEE-kay),” she explained, is applied to the culture and artifacts found in the Cupisnique ravine located between the Jepetepeque and Chicama valleys of northern Peru. Most Cupisnique-style ceramics were created between approximately 1200 and 200 BCE.
Previous scholars have emphasized religious interpretations of these ceramics, she said. Her research suggests the head motifs “function as social and political markers based on the specific role that the Cupisnique valley played in regional trade.”
Huntington recently won a $10,000 annual grant from a private philanthropist to further her research.
She has taught at JSU since 2011.
Huntington received her Ph.D. in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010. In 2012, she curated an exhibition for which she also wrote and published a catalogue called Mirrors of Clary: Reflections of Ancient Andean Life in Ceramics from the Sam Olden Collection.