Iconography and epigraphy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Farmer.

The Barrier Canyon Style (aka. Barrier Canyon Anthropomorphic Style) is widely regarded as one of the more prominent and significant pictographic rock art styles in North America, and the Great Gallery from Horseshoe Canyon in Utah has long been recognized as both the type-site and arguably most prominent and complex of all Barrier Canyon Style sites. It is also the most overly exploited and often visually abused site in popular visual culture. Beyond scholarly reproduction, images of the Great...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Miller.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The striking recumbent stone figure known as a chacmool is a defining feature of the Mesoamerican Terminal Classic and Postclassic, occurring not only at Chichen Itza and Tula, where the largest number of figures is documented, but also in later Mexica...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tia Watkins. Rosamund Fitzmaurice. Christophe Helmke. Jaroslaw Zralka. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The precolumbian game of patolli was imbued with ideals of competition, risk, and ritual significance. The board game had a widespread presence across Mesoamerica throughout the Classic period (~ AD 250–820) and was often etched into the surfaces of monumental architecture. Recent excavations led by the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chun Yu.

This is an abstract from the "Populations of Early Medieval China: Developing Anthropological Approaches to Historical Archaeology in China" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of the last two decades there have been a number of hoards of Buddhist statues excavated in Northern China. Each of these hoards contains several hundred statues of varying forms and quality. This study examines both the form and the tool marks on the statues to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Nuckols-Wilde.

This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-eighth century, Copan’s fifteenth ruler, K’ahk’ Yipyaj Chan K’awiil, oversaw the completion of Structure 10L-26 (or Temple 26), which was crowned with a stone inscription located within the superstructure. This inscription features a parallel display of Maya full-figure glyphs alongside...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alberto Ortiz Brito.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After excavating Gulf Coast archaeological sites, Alfonso Medellin Zenil affirmed that Olmec monuments were carved during the Late Classic period (600-900 AD). He made this statement two decades after the second round table of the Mexican anthropology society, in which scholars agreed on placing the Olmec culture in the Preclassic period, based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Safronov. Dmitri Beliaev. Milan Kovác.

This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dynastic history of Uaxactun is one of the most ancient among the political centers of the Maya Lowlands in the Preclassic and Classic periods. The beginning of history of a dynasty concerns to the III cent. BC, and its end to the final years of the IX cent. AD. On an extent more than a thousand-year history the dynasty...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Garay Herrera.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic Maya period inscriptions provide us with extensive documentation of the rituals and ceremonies that Maya elites performed as part of their royal duties. Throughout this paper we will discuss those that were overseen by women belonging to the royal houses of the polities of the Maya lowlands, which have been recorded through the images and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador.

This presentation describes the process of recording and documenting the pictographs found at the site of Chalcatzingo, Morelos, in central Mexico. It shows the way in which state of the art technology is used for the first time at the site for this purpose. Iconographic analysis, landscape archaeology and the analysis of painting techniques and materials are as well employed to enrich the interpretation of rock art at the site. Upon this basis we elaborate a hypothesis about their relations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melinda Leach.

Prehistoric rock art increasingly is understood to be embedded in complex cultural systems of social routines, kin networks, economic landscapes, technological change, seasonal population movements, domestic and task-specific foraging behaviors, and variable gendered activities. The Holocene record of occupation and use of the High Rock Country in the Northern Great Basin provides an opportunity to explore such complex contexts of rock art. Rich lithic sources, strategic locations for hunting,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pawel Polkowski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated some 350 km from the Nile Valley, Dakhleh Oasis is considered one of the largest rock art complexes in Egypt. The petroglyphs found there were executed in various periods, beginning from the Early Holocene, through Pharaonic times, towards modernity. Often being located in the same areas, they constitute large palimpsests witnessing a long history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Loendorf.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sacred Sites Research, Inc. and Versar Inc., working in cooperation with the Mescalero Apache Tribe and the Hopi Tribe, recorded and evaluated 17 rock art sites in New Mexico's Permian Basin, a project supported through the Bureau of Land Management programmatic agreement. Sixteen of the sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox. Whitney Cox.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been a long-running debate over the function of rock art. The authors provide a definition of prehistoric Southwest Native American religion relating to cyclical time and the cosmos and show how certain aspects of rock art in the American Southwest operate within a greater Mesoamerican ideological and religious worldview.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolina Guedes.

A new project carried out in the region of the Rio Vermelho / São Lourenço river basin in the central-western region of Brazil started in 2016. This project focus on the studies of the initial stages of the establishment of the hunters gathers groups in this region. It is intended through excavations, surveys and research in rock art to show patterns of the peoples who inhabited that region. The first systematic field surveys within this project, entitled "Archeology in the Pantanal region"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Hernandez.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the special collections of the Latin American Library at Tulane University is a tracing made by William Spratling of an original *lienzo map centered on the town of Noxtepec, Guerrero. Painted by a *tlacuilo, the *lienzo likely dates to the end of the sixteenth century. This little-known piece exemplifies the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annabeth Headrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The city of Chichen Itza has defied attempts to identify individuals who ruled the city and its basic political organization. Scholars once argued for a shared governance system called multepal, basing this assertion on glyphic references to a series of people who apparently jointly held power. Subsequent scholarship challenged this assertion, as revised...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador.

This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on landscape archaeology, achaeoastronomy, the analysis of rock art iconography, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic documents, this paper proposes to define the factors that determine the sacredness of rock art sites in the Sonoran Desert. Well characterized common patterns can be found in most of the rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annabeth Headrick.

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While many scholars have suggested that the Aztec sacrificed individuals on the Calendar Stone, this paper will not only explore this aspect but also the object’s affiliation with another form of sacrifice, auto-sacrifice. Using ethnohistoric records, connections between the imagery of the stone and acts of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarahh Scher.

This paper explores the visual language of gender expression in Moche art, seeking to determine the relationships among ambiguous gender, social role, and status in Moche visual culture. The Moche are well-known for their representations of warriors and warfare, as well as the sacrificial rituals associated with the taking of prisoners. However, this martial focus was not consistent across Moche time and space, and regional variations indicate the existence of a potential field of expression...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Simon Martin.

This is an abstract from the "New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies of the inscriptions related to the Kaanul dynasty has revealed a new ruler named K’ahk’ Ti’ Ch’ich’. He is mentioned in various Maya sites (El Peru, Uaxactun, Naranjo) as a high king and overlord with a wide dominion. His accession in 550 CE is recorded on the wooden Lintel 3 from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Testard.

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. In Mesoamerica, the wearing of wide belts, skirts, and huipils is characteristic of feminine representations. From the Epiclassic period onward, but more frequently in the Early Postclassic period in Central and Western Mexico, the skirts of certain feminine figurines start to wear what has been called, among many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Beekman.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much research on the links between Mesoamerica and South America has focused on the methods of exploitation of shell (e.g. Spondylus, Strombus) and its possible trade across sub-regions. However, superficially similar methods of exploitation may be local solutions to common problems and methods for sourcing shell remain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Solometo. Wesley Bernardini. Dalton Olson. David Biddle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shields and shield bearers are recurrent and widespread motifs in Pueblo IV (AD 1300-1540) rock art. Polly Schaafsma has argued that depictions of shields and shield bearers in the Rio Grande were part of an iconographic complex that expressed ideas about warfare and war ritual. When inscribed on the landscape, shields may have recalled actual warfare, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prayerstone hypothesis, grounded in Southern Paiute oral history, holds that selected incised stone artifacts were votive offerings deliberately emplaced where spiritual power (puha) was known to reside, accompanying prayers for personal power and expressing thanks for prayers answered. Proposing significant and long-term linkages between Great Basin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Hayward. Michael Cinquino. Frank Schieppati. Don Smith.

There is some suggestion in the literature, most explicitly developed by Espenshade (2014) for Puerto Rico, that major enclosures, particularly with rock art, at some point in their life cycle could be considered shrines or special religious places that increasingly attracted visitors or pilgrims from non-local on- and off-island locations. Pilgrimage rounds are well-established components of religious systems both past and current in various parts of world, including the incorporation of a...