Iconography and epigraphy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandre Tokovinine.

This paper considers textual and visual evidence of debt among Classic Maya nobles. It begins with an overview of lexical data and summarizes specific references to payment and accounting. The argument proceeds to some less obvious contexts such as ‘just-so’ myths, which reveal a notion of primordial transactions and gifts to be repaid in perpetuity. Finally, the paper considers the movement of inscribed objects. The argument is that giving those essentially inalienable possessions marked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Forde.

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For peoples of the Postclassic Mixtec highlands, ruins of earlier civilizations were often found on mountaintops outside some of the most politically prominent communities in the region. These ruined hilltop sites came to be viewed as places of primordial origin and were sites of religious pilgrimage. In this paper, drawing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Petrified Forest National Park" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Chaco Phenomenon remains a contentious and ever evolving paradigm of Southwest Archaeology. Key to understanding the nature of Chaco is the extent and purpose of the many outlying great house communities scattered across the northern Southwest. One of the farthest flung of these possible outliers is the Mac-Stod great house...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chantal Huckert.

This is an abstract from the "The Precolumbian Dotted-Diamond-Grid Pattern: References and Techniques" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Various researches report that the diamond, rhomboid, and square-gridded patterns and their stepped variants designate the surface of the earth as the fecund female progenitor, manifested in flowers, corn cobs, and sweet, nurturing waters. These patterns also designate the zoomorphic aspects of the shell or skin of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaylee Spencer. Maline Werness-Rude.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Narratives featuring the Maize God are well represented on Classic Maya ceramics. Appearing with numerous other characters and plants in underworld settings, this deity is abundantly documented in scholarly literature. Despite his ubiquity in ancient imagery, the Maize God remains a slippery creature, with an identity that overlaps with other supernaturals. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bobi Deere. Jesse Nowak.

This is an abstract from the "Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cave art is amongst the earliest evidence of art in the North American Southeast, and was instrumental in establishing Early Mississippian period iconographic styles. Exploring the imagery found in caves across different cultural regions provides alternative contexts to understand distinct belief systems and ritual practices....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The area stretching from the Usumacinta River basin in western Guatemala into the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, hosted key centers of Classic Maya political and cultural life (ca. 250–850 CE). Scribes and sculptors active across the region produced hundreds of stone monuments inscribed with texts in a common hieroglyphic script. Yet little is known about how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This study examines the spatial patterning of shield iconography at late Pueblo III sites (A.D. 1250-1300) in the Tsegi Canyon system, as an indicator of shared group identity. In the mid-13th century, the Tsegi Canyon region of northeastern Arizona followed a greater regional trend of communities coalescing into defensive high canyon alcoves, accompanied by the adoption of shield iconography, likely influenced by Freemont traditions to the north. These images are variously interpreted to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Gonlin. David Webster. David Reed.

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A Classic Maya rural household, Site 34C-4-2, yielded two artifacts considered unusual for this nonurban context: a manopla (a 15-pound tuff ball with a handle used in a sport similar to boxing) and a miniature sculpture of a house or altar that resembles those found in Copan’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Miller.

One of the distinctive features of one of the principal Maya solar deities, the Jaguar God of the Underworld, is the twisted cord—nicknamed "cruller" for the German doughnut over 100 years ago by Eduard Seler—that loops under the eyes (with their characteristic inward curl for pupils) and twists between them, sometimes ending under the deity’s jaguar ears. This feature, perhaps to be associated with fire and burning, takes up its place on the nose of a different deity, Tlaloc, in Central Mexico,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dante García. Nelly Robles.

This is an abstract from the "Avances en los estudios de la arquitectura de Monte Albán" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En los sistemas de escritura precolombina de Mesoamérica, la zapoteca se conoce principalmente por los diversos estudios realizados en el desciframiento de estelas, pintura mural y vasijas cerámicas que han permitido conocer importantes informaciones sobre las élites político-sociales, sus alianzas matrimoniales, rituales...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Camacho-Trejo.

This is an abstract from the "Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mexicas were one of the civilizations that achieved a striking power of acquisition during Postclassic Mesoamerica. Through trade routes reaching down to Central America, they were able to procure exotic materials and artifacts not accessible in the basin of Mexico. One of these exotic materials was flint, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Critchley.

Spear-thrower devices held a role around the world as a primary weapon and tool before slowly falling out of favor in certain areas for other projectile weapons. While it is widely accepted that spear-throwers were used by the people of the ancient central Andes, comparatively little research has gone into the role that they had as weapons of war, hunting tools, and objects of ceremonial reverence. Many Andean societies have rich traditions of art and iconography, often portraying human and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Saldaña. Tia Watkins. Emma Messinger. Rosamund Fitzmaurice. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic Maya graffiti (AD 300–800) provides a unique perspective of individual experiences, with figures etched onto plastered surfaces that were added as secondary elements within existing architecture. In the Maya lowlands, graffiti is typically found within monumental architecture, as these contexts favor preservation in tropical environments. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emanuela Rudnicka.

This is an abstract from the "A Decade of Multidisciplinary Research at Castillo de Huarmey, Peru" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The technological, stylistic, and iconographical aspects of decorated gourds are yet insufficiently addressed by researchers of precolumbian Andean art. This paper investigates Wari pyro-engraved gourd vessels that have been discovered during the excavation process at Castillo de Huarmey since 2013. The archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina McSherry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The location of the American Civil War Battle of Gettysburg, now preserved at the Gettysburg National Military Park (GNMP), receives thousands of visitors every year. Visitors to the battlefield interact with over 1,000 monuments across the landscape that both commemorate the actions that took place and memorialize the participants in those actions. Presented...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dillon Gisch.

This is an abstract from the "What Have You Done For Us Lately?: Discrimination, Harassment, and Chilly Climate in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 1792, nine catalogues of surviving ancient Roman replicas of the Knidian Aphrodite—the first monumental image of an unclothed woman in Western art—have been compiled. During this time, the number of known ancient replicas has increased by two orders of magnitude, yet analyses of this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sahar Monrreal.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of popular images containing people of color in colonial settings serve as a useful tool for archaeologists using widely circulated images like advertising for explaining or enhancing discussions regarding racial and social differences found in the historical record. However, as more than a supplement to archaeological discussion, these images can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Alberti.

This is an abstract from the "Northern Rio Grande History: Routes and Roots" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaic foragers represent one extreme of the relationship between routes and roots. There is a wealth of evidence in the US Southwest of the itinerant, ambulatory lifeways of ancient populations—impermanent campsites, lithic scatters near likely animal trails and watering holes, and the enigmatic rock art that appears along watercourses or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Boyd.

This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico are home to one of the most sophisticated and compositionally intricate rock art traditions in the world—the Pecos River style. This style is characterized by finely executed, polychromatic figures woven together to form mythic narratives. Artists depicted and vivified the actors in these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angel González López.

The rise of the Aztec Mexica Empire is well represented in the archaeological record,especially through the wide spread evidence of stone sculptures in the main Precinct of the imperial capital. In less two hundred year of history, the island became the principal producer of these artifacts. Its workshops created not only numerically more pieces, butalso monumental pieces and sculptures with complex iconography and new discourses. This paper will discuss the problem of using the term "Aztec" to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerald Ek.

This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of Teotihuacan influence in the Maya Area has been a topic of enduring controversy. A growing corpus of evidence indicates direct political intervention by Teotihuacan across the Maya Lowlands starting in 378 CE facilitated through links with the Mutal Dynasty of Tikal. Emulation was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Sherwood. Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

This presentation reports on a new rock art site from Kentucky, brought to the authors' attention by local citizens. Inside a large sandstone rockshelter, more than a dozen black pictographs show several anthropomorphic characters. These images bear distinctive features and regalia associated with the "Redhorn Cycle" hero narrative reported by Paul Radin in 1948 from his ethnographic work among the Ho-Chunk. The rock art from this "Morning House" strongly resembles well-known Mississippian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Pozorski. Shelia Pozorski. Rosa Marin Jave.

Recent excavations at a number of intermediate-sized mounds of the Initial Period (2100-1000 B.C.) site of Taukachi-Konkán in the Casma Valley of Peru have uncovered surprising new evidence of clay friezes and architectural forms previously unknown for the Initial Period along the coast of Peru. One U-shaped mound complex has an associated sunken rectangular plaza that contains distinct friezes on all four of its sides. The content of the friezes includes two sea lions, a large feline and two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela La Chioma.

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Moche art, archaeological evidence related to sound and music can be found in cultural materials from sculptured bottles to the notorious fine-line paintings. Sound-producing instruments, musicians, and musical performances have been featured worldwide in museum expositions and scholarly discourse about...