Iconography and epigraphy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Ladron De Guevara.

The deities of El Tajin seem to share a characteristic scroll eyebrow in bas reliefs as well as in mural paintings. I will follow the representation of such an icon, trying to recognize posible origins, the outreach of the element and the symbolic associations in Mesoamerican time and space.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Lagarde.

This is an abstract from the "Chavín de Huántar’s Contribution to Understanding the Central Andean Formative: Results and Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The sculptural figures at Chavín de Huántar have long been considered potent symbols of a unified religious tradition across the Andes mountains. Today, Chavín is recognized as a Formative period pilgrimage center located in the highlands of modern-day Peru. It is known for its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Florence.

The Central Mexican city of Teotihuacan rose to prominence in the last century BC and lasted for six centuries The civic plan was arranged around two main perpendicular avenues lined with temples and public monuments. By the third century AD, the population was housed in apartment compounds. On the walls were murals depicting ornately dressed administrators, armor-clad warriors, and fantastic creatures. These murals were the birthplace of the Feathered Serpent. My research proposes that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeff Kowalski.

This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At Uxmal, Yucatán, monumental plumed snakes appear in the sculptural program of the Main Ballcourt and Nunnery Quadrangle. These feathered serpents express complex concepts connected to their pan-Mesoamerican role as a demiurge associated with dawning light, life force, and cosmic order...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polychrome pottery from the Greater Nicoya region of Central America prominently features ‘feathery serpents’ that have been associated with the Mixteca-Puebla tradition of greater Mesoamerica. A closer look at the variety of ‘feathery serpents’ has discriminated between more Borgia-like images...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Guernsey. Andrew D. Turner. Michael Love.

Pedestal sculptures featuring supernatural felines with cacao drupes projecting from their foreheads dotted the Late Formative landscape of the Pacific slope and adjacent Guatemalan Highlands. In this paper we consider the implications of the replication of this sculptural form, its role in articulating an elite agenda linked to the production of cacao, and its pertinence to sites of varying scale and relative regional authority. A similar suite of meanings engaged with cacao and supernatural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Arnold.

Great is the conflation of Ehecatl Quetzalcoatl and Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: a mythical player in the world creation of Mesoamerican groups vs. a semi-historical personage who presaged the arrival of Hernán Cortés. Veracruz, a region implicated via the activities of both avatars, is particularly enmeshed in this duality. The Postclassic narrative whereby Quetzalcoatl journeyed to the Gulf lowlands appears to be foreshadowed in the desacralization of Teotihuacan’s Feathered Serpent Pyramid at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew D. Turner.

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the tumultuous Epiclassic period (AD 600-900), several smaller polities in Central Mexico and the Gulf Coast rose to prominence in the wake of the collapsed metropolis of Teotihuacan. Although this period is often characterized by rampant militarism, wide-ranging economic activities,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oswaldo Chinchilla.

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the richest repertoires of Mesoamerican flower imagery comes from the Pacific coast of Guatemala. In this paper, I trace the temporal variations in religious beliefs and imagery related to portentous places of beauty known that modern scholars designated as "flower worlds." Lush...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Cordova.

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonial Mexican portraits of priests, nuns, and children donning elaborate floral trappings indicate their subjects’ holiness and connect Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican ideas of sacredness, nobility, and a propitious afterlife. Their rich visual display explicitly highlights the virtuousness...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A core principle of professional archaeology is the preservation and consideration of context. For studies of rock imagery, this necessitates documenting the context of panels in relationship to the larger cultural landscape. Using landscape theory, I assess the placement of petroglyphs and pictographs at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

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. Foreign influence was a major component at Teotihuacan from very early on and throughout Teotihuacan’s history. Extensive archaeological research notes Teotihuacan as a religious center and the largest Classic Mesoamerican city with multiethnic apartment compounds and neighborhoods. However, the impact of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Houston.

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 I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For close to a century, a remarkable set of shells have been found archaeologically across the Maya region and beyond. Most likely shaped and incised in a single workshop, they present a decided paradox, depicting specific warriors and elites yet, on these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Gillespie. Cherra Wyllie.

This is an abstract from the "Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the landmark 1986 “Blood of Kings,” kingship has been a central theme in the archaeology, iconography, and epigraphy of the ancient Americas. Despite recent discoveries, the topic of women rulers remains ancillary to the larger view of male-dominated social and political power. During the past 30 years, roles of women have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frank Reilly.

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. I suggest that at some point in the development of the Braden art style that the 3D flint-clay statuettes (AD 1100–1175) take the place of the earlier Braden-style paintings (AD 900–1000) found in caves and rockshelters, while temples (BBB Motor Site) that house the flint-clay statuettes substitute for the caves that housed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Coltman. Karl Taube.

This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most representations of the feathered serpent at Chichen Itza depict a plumed rattlesnake, a being of wind and carrier of rain, with Central Mexican origins dating back to Early Classic Teotihuacan. In Classic Maya art, feathered serpents are not rattlesnakes and lack plumage aside from a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Loomis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gender is one of the primary identity categories that provides structure to the social organization of societies. It sets expectations for the activities, status, presentation, and spatial organization of individuals within a community. This study aims to interrogate the social role of gender in the Teuchitlán tradition of Jalisco, Mexico, through a survey of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ángel Sánchez Gamboa. Caitlin Earley.

This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The scarce glyphic corpus recorded in the Eastern Highlands of Chiapas makes it difficult to reconstruct dynastic lineages in this western frontier region of the Maya world; Chinkultic is the only case of study in which we find important epigraphic evidence. As a result, material culture and style are key elements to understand political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Very small things, especially ones worn on the body, have unique positions within persons’ lives and across them. They possess their own type of temporal and material persistence, arising not from being large and formidably unmovable, but from an ability to discreetly carry on from one moment and space to another. Given their substance, significations, or...

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 Peter Whitridge.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although simple tags are liable to appear anywhere, contemporary graffiti thrives in places that are marginal to everyday traffic, such as alleyways, rooftops, overpasses and vacant or abandoned structures. Even in these places graffiti is usually impermanent; other writers will eventually go over it or the wall will...

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 Rosario Cordero-Fernández.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It seems that the primary function of painted hand imprints on rock shelters in the Middle Ibáñez River Valley (Chile) may have been to assist in promoting social cohesion within and between hunter-gatherer groups. Hand imprints possess the quality of replicating the hand that created them, thus becoming a personal statement. These imprints have been...