Search Results (174)

Since 1992, we have promoted the use of descriptions from ethnographic data, including ancient, surviving oral traditions, to aid in explaining the iconography portrayed in pictographs and petroglyphs found in Missouri, particularly those at Picture Cave. The literature to which we refer is from American Indian groups related linguistically and connected to the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Missouri. In addition, we have had on-going conversations with many elder tribal members of the Dhegiha Sioux language group (including the Osage, Quapaw, and Kansa (the Ponca and Omaha are also part of this cognate linguistic group)). With the copious collections of southern Siouan ethnographic accounts, we have been able to explain salient features in the iconography of several of the detailed rock art motifs and vignettes, and propose interpretations. This Midwest region is part of the Cahokia interaction sphere, an area that displays western Mississippian symbolism associated with that found in Missouri rock art as well as on pottery, shell, and copper. Full article

The Western genre has traditionally been associated with American identity and male-dominated narratives. However, recent decades have seen increasing attention to female protagonists, particularly the European woman as a cultural mediator within the frontier context. This study aims to identify the archetypes of the European woman in the Western genre through a diachronic and comparative analysis of the visual language found in European painting from the late 17th to early 19th centuries and in 20th–21st century cinema. The research methodology combines narrative, visual, and semiotic analysis, with a focus on intermedial and intertextual parallels between visual art and film. The study identifies nine archetypal models corresponding to goddesses of the Greek pantheon and traces their transformation across different aesthetic systems. These archetypes, rooted in artistic traditions such as Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, and others, reappear in Western films through compositional, symbolic, and iconographic strategies, demonstrating their persistence and ability to transcend temporal, medial, and geographical boundaries. The findings suggest that the woman in the Western genre is not merely a central character, but a visual sign that activates cultural memory and engages with deep archetypal structures embedded in the collective unconscious. Full article

In clinical practice, left ventricle hypertrophy (LVH) continues to pose a considerable challenge, highlighting the need for more reliable diagnostic approaches. This study aims to propose an automated framework for the quantification of LVH extent and the classification of myocardial segments according to hypertrophy severity using a deep learning-based algorithm. The proposed method was validated on 133 subjects, including both healthy individuals and patients with LVH. The process starts with automatic LV segmentation using U-Net and the segmentation of the left ventricle cavity based on the American Heart Association (AHA) standards, followed by the division of each segment into three equal sub-segments. Then, an automated quantification of regional wall thickness (RWT) was performed. Finally, a convolutional neural network (CNN) was developed to classify each myocardial sub-segment according to hypertrophy severity. The proposed approach demonstrates strong performance in contour segmentation, achieving a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 98.47% and a Hausdorff Distance (HD) of 6.345 ± 3.5 mm. For thickness quantification, it reaches a minimal mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.01 ± 1.16. Regarding segment classification, it achieves competitive performance metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods with an accuracy of 98.19%, a precision of 98.27%, a recall of 99.13%, and an F1-score of 98.7%. The obtained results confirm the high performance of the proposed method and highlight its clinical utility in accurately assessing and classifying cardiac hypertrophy. This approach provides valuable insights that can guide clinical decision-making and improve patient management strategies. Full article

Past archaeological practices have resulted in a distorted history of Native American cultures based upon western-biased research. This has been especially apparent in the rock art of the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon and northern California. In response to this, Native and non-Native scholars are striving to develop a counter-discourse that both challenges and replaces western constructs in research on Native American communities. The result of this approach is a growing trend within the discipline that has come to be called “Indigenous Archaeology.” Critical to this approach is that Native voices are transported from the margins of the research to its center, where they are intended to replace the Western colonialist narrative. Unfortunately, Native American tribal communities have been the targets of federal assimilation policies for the past few centuries, and as a result, much of their cultural knowledge unwittingly carries forward this distorted past. In this paper I explore a framework built upon ethnographic accounts of shamanism and rock art, along with a robust familiarity with local myth, and how this provides a foundation of traditional cultural knowledge against which to compare and evaluate the interpretive statements made in contemporary tribal members about rock art and other sacred material culture. Full article

Background/Objectives: In Mexico, there is very little data on the prevalence of metabolic syndrome in people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART), so, determining the number of people with this condition will help to establish measures to treat it promptly. Methods: A descriptive, observational, prospective, cross-sectional study was conducted in a cohort of people living with HIV who signed the informed consent form and were stratified according to the criteria established by the Adult Treatment Panel III (ATP-III) and the Latin American Diabetes Association (ALAD) for the diagnosis of metabolic syndrome. Results: According to the ATP-III and ALAD criteria, 26.5% and 36.3% of people living with HIV receiving ART were diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, respectively. Metabolic syndrome was more prevalent in men than in women, using both classification criteria (ATP-III: 58 men [67.4%] vs. 28 women [32.6%]; ALAD: 84 men [71.2%] vs. 34 women [28.8%]). The median time since HIV diagnosis of the participants with metabolic syndrome was longer than for the participants without metabolic syndrome, using the ALAD criteria (p = 0.023). The time spent on ART among participants with metabolic syndrome was longer than among those without, using the ATP-III criteria (p = 0.011). The CD4+ T-cell count and HIV-RNA detection showed no significant difference between participants with and without metabolic syndrome (p > 0.05). No statistical significance was found concerning ART and metabolic syndrome; it is noteworthy that for participants with dolutegravir/abacavir/lamivudine (DTG/ABC/3TC), the frequency was similar regardless of the criteria used, and different for those who were taking bictegravir/emtricitabine/tenofovir alafenamide (BIC/FTC/TAF) or were in other schemes (etravirine, darunavir/ritonavir, raltegravir). Conclusions: Our results suggested that 26.5% and 36.3% of the people living with HIV receiving ART included in this study had metabolic syndrome according to ATP-III and ALAD criteria, respectively. These results are consistent with results reported in the Latin American population. Interestingly, both criteria showed a higher frequency of metabolic syndrome in men living with HIV compared to women. Full article

This paper explores Great Basin arid-zone hunter–forager rock art as signalling behaviour. The rock art in Lincoln County, Nevada, is the focus, and this symbolic repertoire is analysed within its broader archaeological and ethnographic contexts. This paper mobilises an explicitly theoretical approach which integrates human behavioural ecology (HBE) and the precepts of information exchange theory (IET), generating assumptions about style and signalling behaviour based on hunter–forager mobility patterns. An archaeological approach is deployed to contextualise two characteristic regional motifs—the Pahranagat solid-bodied and patterned-bodied anthropomorphs. Contemporary Great Basin Native American communities see Great Basin rock writing through a shamanistic ritual explanatory framework, and these figures are understood to be a powerful spirit figure, the Water Baby, and their attendant shamans’ helpers. This analysis proposes an integrated model to understand Great Basin symbolic behaviours through the Holocene: taking a dialogical approach to travel backward from the present to meet the archaeological past. The recursive nature of rock art imagery and its iterative activation by following generations allows for multiple interpretive frameworks to explain Great Basin hunter–forager and subsequent horticulturalist signalling behaviours over the past ca. 15,000 years. Full article

In the central Mesa Verde region, rock art occurs on canyon walls and on boulders that are frequently associated with other archaeological remains. Moreover, rock art, together with architecture and pottery, is actually a primary source of archaeological information about the presence of various cultures in the area. It includes paintings and petroglyphs of Ancestral Pueblo farming communities, images and inscriptions made by post-contact Ute and possibly Diné (Navajo) people as well as historical inscriptions of the early Euro-Americans in this area. This paper presents the results of archaeological investigations at four large rock art sites from Sandstone Canyon, southwestern Colorado, within the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument (CANM). Methods of rock art recording included advanced digital photography, photogrammetry, terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), hand tracing, and consultations with members of indigenous societies and rock art scholars. Geophysics and sondage excavations were conducted at one site revealed important information about archaeology, environment, and geology of the area. Analysis of rock art and other material evidence aims to help reconstruct and understand the mechanisms and nature of cultural changes, migrations, and human–environmental interactions and later cross-cultural contacts between indigenous peoples and Anglo-American ranchers and settlers in southwestern Colorado and the US Southwest. Full article

Delamar Valley is a unique landscape located in southern Nevada that contains places associated with ceremony and Southern Paiute Creation. This ceremonial landscape is composed of volcanic places, a large Pleistocene Lake, and an underground hydrological system that allows for the movement of spiritual beings known as water babies between Delamar Valley and neighboring Pahranagat Valley. Paiute shamans traveled to Delamar Valley to interact with the portals along a volcanic ridge that allowed them to travel to a mirrored ceremonial landscape in another dimension of the universe. While in this mirrored landscape, shamans engaged with elements of Creation. This essay examines the ways in which Paiute shamans interacted with various components of the physical and spiritual landscapes. Full article

The 1913 Armory Show has long been celebrated as the moment when America was introduced to modern art. This formalistic understanding of the event, though, would miss another equally important development which would only be observed through a historical materialist methodology that would see it as a response to a crisis of over-supply in the art market. It remains the single primary exhibition staged by the short-lived Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), a secession from the National Academy of Design. Though they would not succeed in creating a long-term alternative to their rival, their exhibition expanded upon innovations by the 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. Through an archival examination of the Armory Show’s sourcing methods, a paradigm shift can be observed leading away from the nineteenth-century salon model by changing the system of artists submitting works to a jury, to one of marketing artworks provided by dealers. This new role for dealers would lead the way to the contemporary art fair model where galleries are the key exhibition decision-makers. Full article

Human gesture image recognition is the process of identifying, deciphering, and classifying human gestures in images or video frames using computer vision algorithms. These gestures can vary from the simplest hand motions, body positions, and facial emotions to complicated gestures. Two significant problems affecting the performance of human gesture picture recognition methods are ambiguity and invariance. Ambiguity occurs when gestures have the same shape but different orientations, while invariance guarantees that gestures are correctly classified even when scale, lighting, or orientation varies. To overcome this issue, hand-crafted features can be combined with deep learning to greatly improve the performance of hand gesture image recognition models. This combination improves the model’s overall accuracy and dependability in identifying a variety of hand movements by enhancing its capacity to record both shape and texture properties. Thus, in this study, we propose a hand gesture recognition method that combines Reset50 model feature extraction with the Tamura texture descriptor and uses the adaptability of GAM to represent intricate interactions between the features. Experiments were carried out on publicly available datasets containing images of American Sign Language (ASL) gestures. As Tamura-ResNet50-OptimizedGAM achieved the highest accuracy rate in the ASL datasets, it is believed to be the best option for human gesture image recognition. According to the experimental results, the accuracy rate was 96%, which is higher than the total accuracy of the state-of-the-art techniques currently in use. Full article

The colonization of Latin America generated a legacy of suffering and irreparable loss, subjugating peoples and cultures and perpetuating structures of oppression. This article investigates how Frida Kahlo’s life and work can be thought of from the neo-Testamentary category of “kenosis”, in the sense of self-emptying that leads to resistance and openness to transcendence. The Mexican painter’s art reflects not only her personal pain but also social marginalization, gender inequality, and the impact of colonization, becoming a visual testimony to the kenosis experienced by the Latin American people. The aim of the study is to analyze how Frida Kahlo’s art resignifies pain and suffering, transforming them into an instrument of denunciation, resistance, and reinvention of herself in the face of colonial oppression and social marginalization. Methodologically, the following paintings were selected: Unos cuantos piquetitos, Las dos Fridas, El abrazo del amor del universo, la tierra (México), Diego, yo y el señor Xólotl, La columna rota, and Diego Rivera y Frida. The theoretical approach privileges voices from the continent but also includes contributions from international scholars. The results point to Frida Kahlo’s art as a visual testimony of the kenotic experience lived by the Latin American people, a space of encounter with the divine where suffering is transformed into resistance, revelation, and hope. Her work represents a path of overcoming, breaking with the invisibility imposed by colonization and offering possibilities for liberation and affirmation of cultural and spiritual identity. Full article

Challenging the still widespread modernist and Eurocentric understanding of Pollock’s art as a formal advance based in Picasso’s cubism, this study explores the pervasive impact of Mexican art, political culture, and myth on the creation of Pollock’s Birth c. 1941. The recent discovery of Pollock’s early exposure to Diego Rivera’s use of the Mesoamerican myth of Quetzalcoatl invites a reconsideration of the sources of his art. The myth of Quetzalcoatl challenged Pollock, who responded not just to Rivera but also to Siqueiros’ understanding of the political significance of art and to Orozco’s call for Quetzalcoatl’s return in a modern migration of the spirit at Dartmouth College. Made aware of the positive potential of this mythic symbolism by his Jungian psychotherapy, we see Pollock using it to counter the destructive force of fascism depicted in Picasso’s Guernica 1937. In the process he discovers his own artistic identity in Birth as a mythmaker in a time of war, capable of generating new Pan-American symbols and forms to challenge the hegemony of Picasso. Full article

Why are rock art sites found in certain places and not others? Can locational or environmental variables inform an understanding of the function and meaning of the art? How can we move beyond observed patterning in spatial associations to a credible explanation of such meanings and ensure that we are not confusing correlation with causation? And what variables were most relevant in influencing site locational choices? These and related problems, whether recognized or not, are the subtext of the last three decades of rock art site distributional and landscape studies. They are now especially important to resolve given the need for accurate predictive modeling due to the rapid transformation of certain regions from undeveloped rural areas into rural industrial landscapes. Partly with this problem in mind, Whitley developed a descriptive model that provides an explanation for the location of Native Californian rock art in the Mojave Desert. It identifies the variables most relevant to site locations based on ethnographic Indigenous ontological beliefs about the landscape. These concern the geographical distribution of supernatural power and its association with certain landforms, natural phenomena and cultural features. His analysis further demonstrated that this model can account for two unusually large concentrations of sites and motifs: the Coso Range petroglyphs and the Carrizo Plain pictographs. But unanswered was the question of whether the model is applicable more widely, especially to smaller sites and localities made by different cultural groups. We documented and analyzed three petroglyph localities with seven small petroglyph sites in the southern Mojave Desert, California, to test this model. These sites are attributed to the Takic-speaking Cahuilla and Serrano tribes. Our study revealed a good fit between the expected natural and cultural variables associated with rock art site locations, with the number of such variables present at any given locale potentially correlated with the size of the individual sites. In addition to the research value of these results, this suggests that the model may be useful in the predictive modeling of rock art site locations for heritage management purposes. Full article

This work provides a synthesis of an initial experience in the development of accessible imaging techniques and their implementation on a real case: the analysis of colonial Hispano-American paintings at the Complejo Museográfico Provincial “Enrique Udaondo” (Luján, Buenos Aires). It discusses different aspects related to the possibilities of obtaining, using, and reusing equipment and materials locally, as well as details of the ways of acquiring images for photography on site. It also provides information about the composition and conservation state of selected artworks, complementing image analysis with portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) data, and reflects on articulated/collaborative work in situ as a methodology for transferring knowledge and skills. The project aims to contribute to strengthening Latin American sustainability by creating accessible non-invasive tools for heritage conservation institutions, highlighting the value of regional capacities to approach heritage studies from collaborative and ethical proposals that promote sovereignty and reduce dependence on external inputs. Full article

An unknown aspect of Josep Lluís Sert (Barcelona, 1902–1983) is his deep engagement with Christian spirituality, particularly following his American exile. This perspective is beautifully reflected in his religious-themed projects, among which historiography has highlighted the church of Puerto Ordaz (Venezuela, 1951), the Chapel of St. Botolph (Boston, 1963–1968), and the Carmel de la Paix Chapel (Mazille, 1967–1972), designed, respectively, before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. Using these three well-known projects as a starting point, our aim is to expand the discussion around this topic to encompass the entirety of Sert’s sacred architecture. The contributions of Sert to the design of modern religious architecture are analyzed in this study, firstly through the distinctive aspects of his architecture, such as its urban scale and interactions between various plastic arts, and secondly through his theological references. This study is based on Sert’s original drawings, as well as specific bibliographic sources and articles from specialized journals. At the same time, it seeks to highlight an aspect of the architect that, despite the significance and brilliance of his designs, has received little attention until now. Full article