page_title: Confronted animals
section_title: Native North American Art
hierarchical_section_title: Confronted animals / Examples from archaeology / Native North American Art
caption_attribution_description: English: Lithography of Powhatan's mantle, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1888. Image cropped from plate XX of Edward B. Tylor, “Notes on Powhatan’s Mantle, Preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.” Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, volume 1 (1888), pages 215-217Deutsch: Lithografie von Powhatans Mantel, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1888. Bildzuschnitt von Tafel XX in Edward B. Tylor, “Notes on Powhatan’s Mantle, Preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.” Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, Band 1 (1888), Seite 215-217
context_page_description: Confronted animals, or confronted-animal as an adjective, where two animals face each other in a symmetrical pose, is an ancient bilateral motif in art and artifacts studied in archaeology and art history. The "anti-confronted animals" is the opposing motif, with the animals back to back.
  Bilateral symmetry is a dominant aspect of our world and strong representation of it with matching figures often creates a balance that is appealing in artwork.
  In ancient art, confronted-animal motifs often involve the Master of Animals, a central human figure between two confronted animals, often grasping them, and are probably part of a unified socio-cultural motif. A related motif in ancient art is known as the Mistress of Animals.
  It is thought that the iconography sometimes has ritual and religious associations; for example, the Lion Gate of Mycenae has a column between the protective, surmounted and confronted lionesses standing with two feet on the ground and two on the same base on which the column rests. The column is thought to represent a goddess, abstracted to avoid tabooed direct representation.
context_section_description: "Powhatan's Mantle" is a cloak of deerskin, which originally belonged to a Native American of high social status. Its decoration consists of shell beadwork, depicting a central standing human figure flanked by two upright, opposed quadrupeds and surrounded by 34 discs. The two animals resemble one another in terms of their overall outline, but their tails and paws differ. The left-hand animal has a long tail and round paws with five articulated digits. The right-hand animal has a shorter tail, and its legs end in cloven hoofs. Historically, this artwork was believed to have belonged Powhatan, who was the paramount chief of Tsenacommacah, an alliance of Algonquian-speaking Virginia Indians in the Tidewater region of Virginia at the time English settlers landed at Jamestown in 1607. "Powhatan's Mantle" is one of the earliest North American artifacts to be collected by Europeans that still survives today.
caption: Lithograph of Powhatan's Mantle
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