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African and Indigenous American symbol systems. What holds the group together is that several members carry a documented dispute about their own use: a Diné symbol four nations formally renounced in 1940 because of what happened to it in Europe, a Zia Pueblo symbol a state took for its flag without permission and has not settled, a stepped Andean cross whose ancient form carries a twentieth-century cosmology presented as ancient. Others record a system partly unrecoverable — nsibidi, restricted to initiates — or partly undeciphered, as most quipus are. The batch's consistent editorial act is refusing to supply a meaning where the evidence does not, and refusing to flatten several traditions into one.
Ideographic marks drawn on cloth, skin and walls.
A cross within a circle, marking four moments of a life.
A figure like a person with arms raised, from Tifinagh.
A cross of dense interlaced latticework with no free ends.
Strips of woven cloth with named geometric blocks.
Cotton cloth patterned in fermented-mud dark on cream.
Bold outlined geometric blocks in saturated colour on a house wall.
A symmetrical drawing traced on the ground in powder.
A cross with bent arms, withdrawn from Diné use.
A circle with four groups of four rays.
A circle divided into four quadrants, often coloured.
Knotted cords hanging from a main cord.
A stepped cross of twelve outer corners, often with a central hole.
A rounded square packed with smaller signs.
A vast carved disc with a central face ringed by glyphs.