For decades, individual scholars working on the precontact Americas have been analyzing clothing, hairstyles, bodily adornment, and accoutrements for clues to personal and group identity. It is only recently, however, that some have started coming together in major institutional settings to address the problem collectively. The 2017 volume Dressing the Part: Power, Dress, Gender, and Representation in the Pre-Columbian Americas grew out of a session of similar name held at the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is ironic, however, that although most of the articles in the volume reflect a ready willingness to draw from a variety of disciplines, including archaeology, the session organizers and editors, as well as all but two of the other contributing authors, are art historians. Moreover, the majority of those art historians are iconographers—that is, they carefully examine complex visual forms and images in search of their original meanings.

Dressing the Part focuses on what depictions of dress and accoutrements tell us about gender across the Americas. The 11 chapters that follow the short introduction are arranged geographically, from North America to Mesoamerica, then to Central America, and from there, to the Andes. As the volume's title indicates, all of the chapters deal with precolumbian art forms, but what it does not tell us is that all of the cultures discussed either were early, predating the arrival of Europeans by at least several centuries, or are relatively poorly known due to minimal archaeological work and sparse ethnohistorical documentation—or both. The authors have therefore tackled some of the most recalcitrant types of artworks in the Americas.

Representing the only case of an overlap of spatial and temporal focus, two chapters deal with the Classic Maya. Both Matthew Looper and Karon Winzenz had an advantage over the other contributors, given that Mayanists can now at least partially read most Classic-period Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions. Like many Mayanists, Looper and Winzenz tend to speak primarily to other Mayanists, at times neglecting to define coded terms and explain complex concepts for readers who work on other times and places. Nonetheless, they each make an important contribution. Looper, supported by five pages of tabulations, shows that although the earliest known so-called netted garment appears at Early Classic Teotihuacan on a female, both men and women, whether human or divine, appear in netted garments in Late Classic Maya art. Winzenz, in contrast, shows that the so-called Quadripartite Badge, mostly seen with males in Early Classic Maya imagery, later appears largely with females in the context of issues such as birth and procreation. Cherra Wyllie, in her chapter on gender in the Classic-period Las Higueras murals in Veracruz, similarly suggests that elite women increasingly played important roles in local religious ceremonies and politics, eventually coming, as she points out, to “[dominate] the narrative” (175).

Laura Wingfield's chapter, albeit highly speculative and somewhat confusing in places, aligns with Looper's in arguing that precontact Costa Rican sculpture shifted emphasis over time from female to male. Costa Rica's famous greenstone axes, which appear to be ambiguous with regard to gender and were most likely made for women, ultimately gave way to the use of metal images to reinforce male dominance. Wingfield's chapter would have benefited, however, from a clear statement of her methodology like that provided by Ann Peters and Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao in their careful, highly descriptive analysis of the layers of textiles wrapped around the Paracas Necropolis funerary bundles in Peru. Supported by two multipage tables, Peters and Tomasto-Cagigao document the diversity of the textile patterns in the bundles and identify their relevance to the sex of the individual they covered. The authors further show that gendered garments and designs sometimes appear on the bundle of a person of the opposite sex, and that some bundles defy a single gender identity. Although male burials predominate, those of females indicate that at least some women played important social and religious roles.

Evidence of female power in Native North American artworks is also underscored by Alice Kehoe, the only contributor to the volume to focus on a surviving art form—that of twining as represented by Great Lakes Osage twined bags. Concentrating on two motifs, the Panther and the Thunderbird, Kehoe notes that the wealthy and highly respected women who created the bags did not “dress up” as we might expect; rather, they wore minimal clothing to signal their power. “Abnegation of dress,” as Kehoe puts it, can and often does reflect high status. Kehoe also points out that earlier, male ethnographers seldom inquired into the art of twining, a glaring example of the all-too-frequent gender biases of some investigators. The chapter by Billie Follensbee and Katie McElfresh Buford makes a related point. In a lengthy and devastating critique of the scholarship on the subject, they home in on the inaccuracies of previous drawings and resulting misinterpretations of what used to be called the “birdman” motif on the Mississippian Eastern Woodlands Rogan plates. Four pages of tabulated data show exactly who has said what regarding the sex and gender of what is now better referred to as the “bird-human” because, as the authors convincingly argue, drawing on earlier works by Catherine Brown and several others, at least some of the winged figures featured on the plates are actually female.

Follensbee, in another strong chapter, applies similarly careful observation to human figures in Preclassic Olmec art. From her analysis she concludes not only that typically male clothing could be appropriated by women and vice versa, but that some Olmec garments were clearly “gender neutral.” Nonetheless, in the end it was lineage rather than sex or gender that determined which garments an Olmec elite chose to wear to reflect his or her power. This contrasts with Sarahh Scher's study of the dress of the so-called High Priestess in Moche art, which shows that the Priestess often appears wearing male ornaments, whereas Moche men are never depicted in female dress. Power among the Moche people seems to have been exclusively expressed via male attributes. Kim Richter, on the other hand, demonstrates that many Huastec sculptures long thought to be male actually represent powerful women whose elaborate headdresses relate them to an international ideology and network. Richter also notes two sculptures of ambiguous gender. Clearly, evidence is mounting that precontact cultures had diverse and multiple understandings of gender and gender roles.

The only essay in the volume to deal with West Mexico is Melissa Logan's study of Late Formative capes seen on figural ceramics from the region. Although Logan's analysis is impressively thorough, including six tables (four of which appear as an appendix), she cannot draw many conclusions beyond showing that capes were worn by both men and women of elite status and mature age. Logan's chapter therefore highlights the difficulty we face in understanding the relation of dress to gender in early and/or largely undocumented societies. As a result, some readers may find much of Dressing the Part rather dry, descriptive, and even arcane in places, and others may complain that some of the authors indulge in a little too much “cloud reading.” Nonetheless, the volume overall proves that painstaking looking, combined with careful comparison and contrasting of art forms—the “grunt work” that iconographers, who are all too often denigrated for their trouble, contribute to our common knowledge—can indeed shed light on the interrelationships of gender, power, and change in undocumented and previously misunderstood pasts. And that is good news for all of us.