1,537 research outputs found
The Emergence of the Bird in Andean Paracas Art. c. 900 BCE - 200 CE
In the first millennium BCE, an enigmatic cultural group now known as Paracas inhabited the remote desert coast of southern Peru. Following its disappearance, Paracas culture did not emerge in the historical record until 1927, when three burial centers were scientifically excavated on the arid Paracas peninsula that gave the culture its name. The burials contained over 400 mummy bundles that preserved the only physical remnants of this culture and its unique art forms. When unwrapped, mummy bundles of elite males revealed multiple layers of finely woven and elaborately embroidered textiles and painted ceramics, along with gold objects, feathers, and other finely crafted artifacts. Such items indicate that the individuals were part of a stratified village society whose members participated in complex ceremonial activities. The art works feature figural imagery based, to a great extent, on the numerous species of sea, air, and land fauna of the south coastal area. In fact, avian imagery and costumes, generally understood to represent humans impersonating supernaturals, dominate in Paracas iconography. The intensity of this interest in birds, demonstrated by their prominence in the art forms, indicates that they held special meaning and value in Paracas society.
In addition to art historical methodologies, this project investigates the emergence of avian imagery and costume in Paracas art by employing the approach of evolutionary aesthetics. It interprets these avian subjects and feathered accessories as reflections of evolved aesthetic inclinations, activated and amplified by the rich bird life in the Paracas region, local ideology, and social needs of the elite members of this hierarchical society. Inspired by the ecology of the Paracas coastal realm, the emergence of the bird in Paracas art initiated a break from an earlier supernatural triad of serpent, bird, and jaguar forged in the first millennium in the Andean highlands. This avian intervention thus reveals a previously unrecognized artistic and ideological agency among Paracas people that demonstrates that they were much more autonomous and inventive than previously acknowledged in scholarship. My study of the small-scale, coastal Paracas society, frequently overlooked in favor of larger highland cultures such as the earlier ChavÃn and later Inca, also enriches our understanding of the artistic contributions of the many diverse cultures of the South American Andes and the Pre-Columbian Americas as a whole
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
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