Iconography and epigraphy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Bennett.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the larger debates in studies of Bronze age Vietnam is the symbolic meaning of Dong Son drums. However, in the academic haste to find this overarching meaning there are several questions that have been left unanswered regarding iconographic variation. In this paper, it is my goal to address the iconographic variability of these drums and explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorraine Williams-Beck. Alejandro Villalobos Pérez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While certain Northern Maya Lowland architectural characteristics remain constant for these three peninsular stylistic “entities” defined by Paul Gendrop, such as few dynastic hieroglyphic monuments, ballcourts or E-Group complexes, the past forty years have revealed many new, insular features: zoomorphic mask elements adorning massive monumental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Watts.

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. While recent scholarship has fruitfully considered the importance of Indigenous ontological commitments (e.g., to power and place) in the creation of rock art, notions of presence as a discrete component of an image’s being remain underexplored. In this contribution, I seek to examine these notions as distinct from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Quintela.

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. Across Petrified Forest National Park, ancestral Puebloans left their mark on the landscape through the creation of thousands of petroglyph panels. While the exact meaning behind the glyphs depicted in petroglyph panels has been blurred by the passage of time and poses a formidable interpretive challenge to archaeologists, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Zborover. Alex Badillo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With over 1,000 individual pictorial elements, Chillihuay is among the largest and most impressive concentration of petroglyphs in southern Peru. Carved on geologically distinct rock outcrops high above the Chorunga Valley, these anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, abstract, and geometrical designs were distributed along narrow trails and hard-to-reach canyons...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig.

This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Petroglyphs have been an understudied form of rock art in the Lower Pecos canyonlands of Texas, in large part due to the small number of sites known to include carved, incised, or pecked designs. The most famous petroglyph site in the region is Lewis Canyon, where over 1,000 figurative petroglyphs were pecked into the limestone bedrock. Aside from Lewis Canyon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Kilgore.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Motherhood" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mountains of the Austrian province of Styria, the Catholic pilgrimage shrine of Mariazell claimed many healing miracles during the later Middle Ages (ca. 1200–1550). Notably, many of these miracles address ailments of fertility and parenthood, including infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant death. Early sixteenth century visual culture of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherra Wyllie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For more than eight decades, numerous ritually interred figurines and skeletal remains have been found in Classic Veracruz architecture. These caches contain tableaus of small, medium, and large-scale ceramic sculpture in conjunction with primary and secondary burials, and deposits of dismembered human bones. Ceramic figures enact scenes depicting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rex Koontz.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The presence of maguey in key iconographic programs at the major Classic Veracruz site of El Tajín has been explained largely through a hypothetical pulque cult at the site. This presentation will both extend and debate this interpretation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franco Rossi. Heather Hurst.

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 2010, archaeologists of the San Bartolo-Xultun Project began investigations of an acropolis complex located at the northern limit of the urban center of Xultun, designated "Los Arboles." The penultimate phase of the complex, dating to the Early Classic period (likely fifth century AD), included extensive preserved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Welch.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carved along the exterior of a cylinder vase [K6511], two waterfowl grip flailing fish with their beaks. These fishing fowl occur again on polychrome pots, effigy bowls, censer stands, and modeled stucco friezes. Numerous examples of the “Waterbird Theme” came to light through the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verónica Vázquez López. Felix Kuppat. Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Armando Anaya Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The history of the Kanu’l dynasty and their Late Classic regime at Calakmul has been researched extensively since the 1990s. The most recent insights into the earlier episodes of Kanu’l politics have emphasized that their seat of power during the Early Classic was Dzibanche and that it was a powerful faction that took power in Calakmul in the early seventh...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The region now divided by the national boundaries of Belize and Guatemala was once home to a broad range of political entities. Noticeably, large centers with monumental inscriptions in the western and southern portions contrast with smaller and far less textually verbose sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Jordan.

Classic Maya stelae have been proposed as precursors for the Early Postclassic stelae at Tula and the relief pillars of Pyramid B at the site in previous scholarship. While suggested Maya connections for the Tula stelae are often overstated, and local central Mexican stela traditions as well as ideas from Oaxaca and Guerrero also probably contributed to the genesis of these monuments, the role of Maya contacts remains plausible. Here I explore possible Maya analogs, including stelae, for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter.

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. The Feathered Serpent was one of the principal Mesoamerican deities before the Spanish Conquest. During the Epiclassic and Postclassic periods, the cult dedicated to this ancient deity, associated with wind, fertility, and rulership, became firmly established within an international elite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Cunningham.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In a 2017 paper on architectural failures in Minoan Crete I suggested that these reflected a greater focus on signification than on engineering. Still failures, as drains that need refitting and paving that needs replacing cannot be seen otherwise; but a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the underlying purpose of these projects provides insight into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharisse McCafferty. Geoffrey McCafferty.

Pacific Nicaragua has long been noted as a cultural crossroads, especially featuring historically documented migrants from central Mexico. Following ethnohistorical accounts, Nahuat speaking groups colonized the Rivas area in the Late Postclassic Ometepe period. The most prominent diagnostic ceramic of this time was Luna Polychrome, often found in mortuary contexts. This paper presents a detailed analysis of over 50 Luna vessels from the Mi Museo collection. The overarching theme of the painted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich. Rachel Gill. Karla Cardona.

Recent research in the Maya lowlands has shown that "E-Group" architectural complexes were intricately tied to the development of complex society during the Middle Preclassic period (900 BC – 300 BC). First identified at the site of Uaxactun, Guatemala, E-Group complexes consist of a western radial platform and eastern range structure. For many years Maya archaeologists believed E-Groups functioned primarily as celestial observatories. However, recent data have shown E-groups were the locus of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Whitridge.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maritime harvesting from watercraft and sea ice was the foundation of precontact Inuit economy throughout the Eastern Arctic, and small watercraft also figured in locally important terrestrial caribou hunts. Boats were everywhere essential to work, travel, and trade during the open...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kay Scaramelli.

This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interpretation of rock art is fraught with difficulties, even when images may appear to be easily identified with cultural objects or elements found in nature. When considering the possible meaning of images of animals, plants, and artifacts depicted in the rock paintings and petroglyphs in the Middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Igor Sarmientos.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, the author discusses an interpretation of the iconography of the murals of Chajul, Quiche, in the highlands of Guatemala. The murals consist of several paintings of Ixil-Maya culture music and dances from the late colonial period. An approach from archaeomusicology and ethnomusicology has been applied in this analysis both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous studies have illustrated the continuing relationship between the Maya area and the Basin of Mexico, especially with the presence of Maya iconography at the site of Teotihuacan. Maya imagery can be seen in diverse cultural materials such as ceramics and stucco-painted murals. For example, researchers have argued that the stucco-painted murals at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomas Barrientos. Ernesto Arredondo Leiva. Julia Guernsey. Diego López García.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The sculptural style known as potbelly (“barrigón”) has been widely documented in archaeological sites in the southern Maya region, from Chiapas to El Salvador, with a few examples in the Lowlands and other areas of Mesoamerica. However, most of these monuments are concentrated in sites occupied during the Late Preclassic period on the Guatemalan Pacific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ángel González López. Nelda Marengo Camacho.

This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Chichen Itza and Tenochtitlan’s religious thought, sacrifice was a creative act closely related to cosmic genesis and world sense. This behavior is evident not only in the archaeological record but also in the iconography. Two of the most common artifacts associated with this ancient practice in both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Stuart.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 1980s saw dramatic new insights into the decipherment of ancient Maya writing, much of it spurred by collaborations with my friend and colleague Steve Houston. One of these was the recognition of inscribed "name-tags" on various types of portable objects and monuments, serving to specify...