Iconography and epigraphy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lars Fogelin.

Mani stones are large stone slabs with Buddhist prayers carved into their surface. In many parts of Tibet, Buddhist pilgrims carry these heavy stones during pilgrimage as an act of devotion. Pilgrims subsequently dry stack Mani stones into large structures including temples, walls and piles outside major religious intuitions. These structures lay, both literally and figuratively, outside of monastic control. In this paper I examine the varied ways Buddhist pilgrims use Mani stones, materialized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Elena Sotelo Santos.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La evidencia escrita más completa sobre el cultivo de abejas en el mundo maya procede del libro jeroglífico prehispánico denominado Códice Tro-Cortesiano. En los almanaques de las abejas que están en las páginas 89b y 103 a la 112 hay abundante información sobre diversos aspectos de la...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, the Early Classic site of Los Horcones is known for being an important gateway community where goods and ideas are distributed. Teotihuacano merchants established a strong presence that included exchanges of commodities and ideas. In this presentation, I would like to look more closely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Nicolay. Margaret Berrier.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Claims for contact between Mesoamerica and the U.S. Southwest predate by centuries the inception of archaeology as a scientific discipline. However, despite such long-standing assumptions and the accumulation of evidence from the archaeological record, including ball courts, copper crotals, cacao, and macaws, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan O'Neil. Nawa Sugiyama. Gilberto Pérez Roldán. Laura Maccarelli. Yosi Pozeilov.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reviews our interdisciplinary study examining a set of carved deer bones comprising what appears to be a weaving or sewing kit for an ancient Maya royal woman bearing the Sa’ emblem glyph associated with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

Artistic evidence of interactions is among the most salient and most debated in terms of the relationships that it represents between different polities and regions. Traditionally, the focus of analysis is on stylistic and iconographic influences and a discussion of retention of original meanings or evidences of disjunctions. Based on my research on the topic of Classic Period interactions from the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, I have come to the conclusion that our perspectives are much too...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Michael Carrasco.

This paper explores theoretical and methodological issues associated with the etic conceptualization of Mesoamerican deity systems and the identification of individual supernaturals in cross–cultural contexts. It critically focuses on previous classificatory systems of Olmec deities. Iconographers often identify individual deities on the basis of defining attributes or material accoutrements, frequently extending these identifications across contexts (as in Covarrubias’ famous "evolution of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shauna Garland.

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 16th century was a time of extraordinary cultural exchange in Central Mexico. The heterogeneous indigenous populations interacted with recently arrived Spanish and the Creole populations. In this paper, I examine one manifestation of these peoples’ concepts of place, space, and movement as visually represented in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Mendoza.

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. Copalli (copal) is an aromatic tree resin and a central figure in Mesoamerican ceremonies. Produced from various species of the Bursera genus, copalli is understood as the blood of trees and can be molded into figures or burned into thick...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonia Foias.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I will explore how much we know about Maya politics during the Classic period (AD 250–950), in view of new perspectives that leave behind the centralization vs. decentralization debate. Rather than viewing Maya states as unitary, unchanging, and centralized or decentralized, new perspectives have revealed variation, multiple sources of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Domenici.

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on previous works that led to the definition of various stylistic families within the corpus of Late Postclassic central and southwestern Mexican mosaics, the paper explores the various formal and technological resources that each group of mosaics employed to attain specific forms of visual complexity....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Guernsey. Kathryn Reese-Taylor.

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. Acts of deliberate fragmentation characterize tuber cultivation. Root plants rarely produce seeds, so new tubers develop by fragmenting the stem and inserting the severed portion into the ground, from which new tubers develop. Evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sergei Vepretskii. Christophe Helmke.

This is an abstract from the "The Rise and Apogee of the Classic Maya Kaanu’l Hegemonic State at Dzibanche" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The most extensive historical record of Caracol was produced under the reign of Tutum Yohl K’inich Tz’uutz’ II (formerly known as K’an II / Ruler V), who reigned from AD 618 to 658. In addition to outlining his life and deeds, as well as those of his father Yajawte’ K’inich Tz’uutz’ II (a.k.a. Lord Water /...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellie Tamura.

Bagan was the political, economic, and cultural centre of Myanmar during the country’s Classical Period (c. 800 – 1400 CE). This immense empire operated primarily on two institutions: the crown and the sangha (Buddhist monkhood). Kutho (merit) was arguably one of the most important Buddhist doctrines in Bagan as it was believed to guarantee better social status upon reincarnation. Kutho, for the elite, was most commonly obtained by contributing large donations to the sangha. These donations took...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Zaragoza.

Definir una región tan antigua y compleja como la Huasteca, implica conocer las características de los grupos humanos que la habitaron; en ella existen diversas manifestaciones culturales a través del tiempo; en esta ocasión presento un primer acercamiento al mundo simbólico que encontramos durante el período Posclásico. Inicié el estudio utilizando cuatro indicadores arqueológicos: Vasijas de cerámica, Concha labrada, Pintura Mural y Escultura. Lo primero que hice fue reconocer los símbolos que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chantal Huckert.

La presentación se centra sobre figuras estelares de ojos emplumados, cruces, estrellas de tres o cinco puntas, y máscaras. Están pintadas y moldeadas en bajo relieve en la vestimenta y el cuerpo de representaciones humanas en barro que pertenecen a los tipos, rojo sobre crema, mayoide, sonriente y escultórico. Se identifican las variantes, procedentes de las culturas del centro de Veracruz, a la luz de formas análogas en las artes y los registros gráficos de Mesoamérica, referidos por los...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Domenici.

The National Museum of the American Indian holds a lot of Mesoamerican mosaic encrusted wooden masks and shields bought in 1921 from Carl A. Purpus, who stated they were found in a cave near Acatlán, Puebla (Mexico). The presentation, besides including a brief description of the artifacts, it is aimed at reconstructing the objects’ unknown contextual information through a comparison with similar objects held in American, Mexican and European museums, some of them proceeding from scientifically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Gillaspie. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project is an archaeological field school operating in the Cayo District of Western Belize and has excavated at multiple sites in Belize annually since 1988. In the past five years, the project has focused on excavation of peri-abandonment deposits, or deposits of artifacts built up during and after the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Prager.

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. The documentation effort within the realm of Maya writing research spans nearly a century and a half, commencing with the systematic recording of Maya inscriptions during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Throughout the initial half of the twentieth century, archaeologists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Klinton Burgio-Ericson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Equally of New Spain and the Pueblo Indian world, seventeenth-century New Mexico presents a fraught social context where diverse materials and imagery became entangled through the creativity of Native artists. Archaeological remnants testify to ceramics’ importance in these exchanges, including combinations of Euro-American forms with Indigenous materials,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Gutiérrez. Kim Richter. Irad Flores.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation we explore political arrangements, settlement organization, and urban dwelling in northern Veracruz during the Postclassic Period. We use the spatial distribution of royal Huastec sculpture, and its placement within the sites. We aim to address Huastec cities and urbanism at the local level.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Livio Dobrez. Patricia Dobrez.

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. Polly Schaafsma has made a major contribution to rock art studies with her detailed analysis of rock art styles in the American Southwest. The joint authors wish to investigate the concept of style, with its roots in art history and application in archaeology and anthropology. In so doing, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Rubenstein.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Puuc region of Yucatán is distinguished by its architectural style, composed primarily of low, range-type structures with limestone veneers. These building surfaces, elaborately carved with iconographic content, also served as backdrops for stucco and stone sculptures, which were placed in niches, on projecting platforms, and incorporated directly into the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox. Carolyn Boyd.

Four principal rules of interpretation for Pecos River Style rock art of the Lower Pecos region of Texas are proposed. These rules were proposed based on a commonality between Pecos River Style and the iconography of historic Corachol-Aztecan speaking tribes such as the sixteenth century Mexica of central Mexico and the present-day Huichol of western Mexico. This presentation shows how the same rules can be applied to the interpretation of the rock art of other prehistoric Corachol-Aztecan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guido Krempel.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper focuses on specific attestations found on Maya monuments featuring human skeletal iconography and to the concave round depressions used in place of their skulls. Such characteristic representation on monuments is mostly limited to the Maya Puuc region of the western Yucatán Peninsula...