Oklahoma! In an unexpected coup, the Sooner State is the only host of a never-before-seen exhibition of Etruscan art from the private collections of an Italian prince and a Vatican museum. Through October 31, "Etruscan Treasures: Unveiling Ancient Mysteries," at the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art at St. Gregory's University in Shawnee, features 200 pieces of gold jewelry and 14 marble and terra-cotta artifacts from the Etruscans, who flourished in central Italy from the eighth to the fourth centuries B.C. The exhibit was created exclusively for the museum, and when the show closes the collections return to storage in Rome. An excellent guide to the culture's artifacts is The Etruscans: Art, Architecture, History (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004; $16.95).
[More exhibitions...]

Stories and Stone: Writing from the Ancestral Pueblo Homeland (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004; $19.95), edited by Reuben Ellis, is a quirky, ruminative collection of essays, stories, travelogues, and poems from four centuries of visitors to the archaeological remains of the Anasazi in the Four Corners region. In an excerpt from a Willa Cather novel, a woman uses her thumb to dislodge "flakes of carbon from the rock roof--the cooking smoke of the Ancient People"; in a passage from the sixteenth-century Coronado Expedition, Pedro de Castaneda notes that one house "had been built by a civilized and warlike race of strangers...." Native writers form a big part of the collection.
[More U.S. books...]

Forty thousand years of artistic output is found in the Atlas of World Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; $150). Though not strictly archaeological, the oversize volume is filled with artifacts, architecture, and innovative maps that give a truly global sense of artistic development around the world, often as revealed in the archaeological record. Crosscultural comparisons are particularly easy to do.
[More books...]