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Dumbarton Oaks Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology
Ecology and the Arts in Ancient Panama
On the Development of Social Rank and Symbolism in the Central Provinces
Olga F. Linares

Linares offers a reinterpretation of the Classic rank-societies of the central provinces of Panama based on archaeological, ecological, iconographic, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic evidence; she concludes that the art styles of this area used animal motifs as a metaphor to express the qualities of aggression and hostility characteristic of social and political life in the central provinces.