The Program for the Art of the Ancient Americas at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is happy to announce the launch of www.ancientamericas.org, a stand-alone website devoted to Pre-Columbian scholarship.

The Ancient Americas web initiative is a valuable resource grounded in the museum’s ongoing commitment to scholarship in this field. With the launch of this site, we hope to create links between past and present civilizations while cultivating a lively exchange of ideas about the art and diversity of Ancient American cultures.

The new site hosts collections, resources, and materials that will continue to develop alongside the Program. It also preserves the pioneering work that the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies did with famsi.org, which we have maintained and hosted since 2011. 

What you see now is only the first step in our mission. Some additional features we look forward to including in the site are:

• Collections. LACMA is excited to provide free access to high-quality scans and photographs of prominent artwork collections. The first collection to receive this treatment is the Linda Schele Drawing Collection - which has undergone high-resolution rescanning and extensive metadata cleanup. LACMA will continue to remaster existing collections in the coming years.
   
• Bibliografía. A cornerstone of the original FAMSI website, Ancient Americas at LACMA will be making substantial improvements to the Bibliografía Mesoamericana to improve searchability, content accuracy, and metadata optimization for the future of linked data. We hope to have the updated Bibliografía Mesoamericana live on ancientamericas.org by Winter of 2015. 
   
• Collaborative Publications. AncientAmericas.org will continue FAMSI’s collaborative strategy of assisting scholars to easily share and disseminate their research. The Ancient Americas Reading Room will expand to house new publications produced by student and professional contributors working with the Ancient Americas editorial board. We hope to provide the community with clear and accessible means to self-publish while ensuring the production of factual and relevant information.
   
• Educational Materials. With involvement from the Program for the Art of the Ancient Americas, LACMA’s education department and external institutions, AncientAmericas.org will provide free access to student and teacher resources for use in the classroom and online.
   
• Professional Resources. AncientAmericas.org will also provide open access to materials and resources that can be used by scholars and in higher-education. This includes improved and expanded access to digitized Codices, free access to printable 3D-scans of LACMA Ancient American objects, and digital recreations of LACMA exhibitions and installations.