Prehistoric Southwestern Craft Arts

Clara Lee Tanner's Prehistoric Southwestern Craft Arts, published by the University of Arizona Press in 1976, is a major reference from one of the foremost authorities on Southwestern Native art. Tanner taught anthropology at the University of Arizona from 1928 onward and wrote the acclaimed Southwest Indian Craft Arts and Southwest Indian Painting; this volume turns to the deep past, surveying the textiles, ornaments, stone bowls, and ceramics of the Anasazi, Mogollon, Hohokam, and their neighbors. The interior plates here, from Conus-shell pendants and turquoise heishi to Little Colorado and St. Johns polychrome bowls, show the breadth of her command of the material.

This copy is signed by Tanner on the title page, above the press's small painted-figure device, an inscription that ties the book directly to the scholar who shaped how generations understood these traditions. The original green pictorial dust jacket survives, with the back-panel author portrait of Tanner holding a prehistoric jar. A documented signed copy like this is worth recording as part of her published legacy.