Written in honor of art historian Esther Pasztory, this volume celebrates her career at Columbia University through a series of fifteen scholarly essays on ancient American (pre-Columbian) visual culture contributed by former students and colleagues. Although space prevents a full description of every essay, all are of high quality, illustrating Pasztory’s influence as scholar, educator, and curator. Coeditors Andrew Finegold and Ellen Hoobler note that Pasztory’s scholarly and academic approach consistently tends toward critical examination of disciplinary methodologies and assumptions.The volume begins with Cecelia Klein’s description of Pasztory’s early years in graduate school in the late 1960s, when they both studied at Columbia University. She situates Pasztory’s approach to the material, and that of her cohort, as original and distinct from other methods employed outside halls of Columbia University. Klein masterfully articulates the historiography of the field at a time when art historians were beginning to reject notions of connoisseurship, colonialism, and primitivism. Eloquently summarizing the earlier sweep of twentieth-century connoisseurship and evolutionistic thought as “wrong-headed,” Klein sets the stage for the emergence of a historically based approach to pre-Columbian art. The critical acuity of their cohort—guided by forward-thinking scholars such as Douglas Fraser, Franz Boaz, and Meyer Schapiro—allowed the field to progress from its early biases toward the distinctly social-historical approach that characterizes much of the field today.The lasting importance of Pasztory’s work at the Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan is reflected in several essays treating professional experiences in the field and in curatorial contexts. Leonardo Lopez Lujan, for example, points to Pasztory’s scholarly insistence on social context as the correct means by which to understand visual culture. He traces the intricate interpretive trajectories of two well-known monoliths from Teotihuacan’s Moon Plaza as case in point, asserting that objects, like human beings, have a “social life” that weaves throughout the intricate cycle of their creation, use, reuse, and destruction, clearly reflecting the times in which the interpretations are made.Subsequently, Kathleen Berrin describes collaborating with Pasztory to curate the pathbreaking exhibition Teotihuacan: City of the Gods for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1988–93). Not only were the negotiations for loan objects from Mexico arduous and politically delicate, but arrangements related to handling a major bequest of looted mural fragments ultimately resulted in a new model for how US institutions might handle ownership and physical possession of stolen antiquities going forward.Evidence of Pasztory’s theoretical influence is seen in a chapter by Gary Urton (17–30), who builds on Pasztory’s (2010) suggestion that Andean aesthetics were underlain by conceptions of networks, invisible lines, immutable essences, and mental diagrams of the world, rather than visual reproductions of it.Pasztory’s former students are well represented, and many of their essays include stories of foundational research or formative experiences gained while at Columbia that strongly influenced their later pursuits. Authors include Cynthia Conides, Lois Martin, and Susan Milbrath, who each make valuable contributions related to the use and meaning of particular iconographic clusters in Teotihuacan and Central Mexican/Aztec imagery. Joanne Pillsbury and Ellen Hoobler in their respective essays challenge how “scientific” illustrations and popular media about ancient American materials have shifted over time. Georgia De Havenon likewise reevaluates the veracity of a foundational source, Alexander von Humboldt in his explorations of Ecuador, and Janice Robertson interrogates the European-generated concept of “picture writing” in relation to painted manuscripts and colonial Nahua language patterns. Jeff Kowalski cites Pasztory’s (1972) work on ballgame symbolism as motivational, leading him to an analysis of ball court, maize, and maize-god connections over time at various Maya sites. Jennifer von Schwerin and Fanziska Fetcher address the lack of culture history sequence in non-Maya Honduras by presenting one in this volume. Timothy King and Andrew Finegold address the relationships between material culture and social practice through analyses of specific categories of, respectively, Aztec-made gold ornaments and atlatls in Nahua art and society.The essays in the volume address vastly different regions and scholarly efforts, yet Pasztory’s broad interests, creative thinking, and encouragement of others to challenge status quo assumptions come through in terms of investigative rigor and originality.