Iconography and epigraphy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Jensen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Various studies into the Medio Period (approximately 1200-1450 CE) of the Casas Grandes archaeological culture have emphasized the importance of interpreting iconographic representations on ceramic artifacts to understand the cosmological and social organization of area. These studies have relied on a variety of theoretical approaches to interpret these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Monge.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal imagery is an essential component ubiquitously present in the ancient cultures of southern Central America. Despite the immense variety of local avian species in the tropics, non-native turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) feature prominently in high-quality polychrome ceramics from the Greater Nicoya area in Costa Rica. In this poster, I present an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherra Wyllie.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cerro de las Mesas Monument 2 is a colossal portrait head. Its flattened rear surface contains a relief-carved scene with a ruler in a broad-brimmed hat, vanquished captive with a calendric sign above his or her head, and a worn hieroglyphic text placed between them. In its entirety Monument 2 bridges the site’s Olmec heritage with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Carlson. John Hoopes.

The unique monumental stone sculptural form known as a "Chacmool" —a reclining human with an offeratory bowl on its abdomen— first appeared in the late Epiclassic period in Mesoamerica, most notably at the Toltec site of Tula in Central Mexico and the Maya site of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. The form is known across Mesoamerica in archaeological contexts from Michoacán, Mexico to Guatamala and El Salvador. It persisted in Central Mexico to the time of the Aztec empire and European Contact, when...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador. Ofelia Márquez Huitzil.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper is dedicated to carrying out a detailed study of some of the reliefs that were carved on the slopes of Cerro Chalcatzingo, during the Middle Formative period, as well as to present some critical reflections about the interpretations that have been made by other authors. All descriptions imply interpretation, in consequence, every process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Coltman.

Chichen Itza has long deserved an approach based on an analysis of the art and iconography of the site for its own merits rather than the continually frustrating analysis that results from attempts to project Late Postclassic religious stories on to the site. Effortlessly blending themes of paradise and militarism, Chichen Itza drew on a wide array of styles that appear in strikingly similar ways indicating the workings of an Early Postclassic International Style that simultaneously integrated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Estrada-Belli. Alexandre Tokovinine.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chochkitam is a major ceremonial center in northeastern Petén, situated among sites with inscribed monuments such as Xultun, La Honradez, Río Azul in Guatemala, and La Milpa in Belize, giving us a few data points on the shifting political history of the Early and Late Classic periods. Since the discovery in 2021 of a carved frieze with a dedicatory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maline Werness-Rude.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chocholá style ceramics were part of a Late Classic northern Maya complex of luxury goods that identified the social status and political affiliation of their owners. Vessels in the style are distinguished by their deeply carved iconographic panels, distinctive formatting, and unique dedicatory formulae. Their recognizability—a necessary component of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaylee Spencer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya artists fashioned ceramic cache vessels that bear a rich array of painted imagery and iconography, making them popular subjects for scholarly investigation. Themes focusing on bloodletting and burning rites are emphasized in many of these discussions, and these themes form the foundations for interpreting the meanings and uses of this class of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Baron.

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 Kerr cataloging project at Dumbarton Oaks is creating opportunities to re-examine iconographic motifs and hieroglyphic texts on Maya pottery. One avenue in which this has been fruitful is the analysis of vessels depicting wahy creatures. In modern communities, ways are powerful...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rex Koontz.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of a larger study on Classic Veracruz fragmented bodies and sculptures, I sketch two case studies of contexts in which fragmented yokes, decapitated heads, and figurine body fragmentation come together in Protoclassic and Early Classic Tres Zapotes and Cerro de las Mesas.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherra Wyllie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tuxtlas Polychrome ceramics of south-central Veracruz, Mexico occupy a visible presence in precolumbian museum collections. Boldly rendered deities and zoomorphic figures are the focal point of bowls, plates, and vases, their images alluding to a complex supernatural world. While well represented among the corpus of Classic Veracruz artifacts, these vessels...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo Pascual Soto.

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. La historia de los primeros años del Epiclásico (ca. 750-850 dC) en El Tajín, Veracruz, no es sólo la historia de esta antigua ciudad. Hay toda una serie de factores que participan de ella en distintos momentos de su desarrollo cultural. Varios de ellos se...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Terlep.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers, most recently Crown and colleagues (2016), have long highlighted the significance of polydactyly (having more than five digits on a hand or foot) within rock imagery and material culture across Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures displaying polycephaly (multiple heads) is another frequent depiction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Evans. Linda Gregonis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. All cultures use symbols to convey ideas. In archaeological contexts those symbols have become ways to define and differentiate archaeological cultures. But what did the symbols mean to the artisans who created them? The art that Hohokam craftspeople produced embodied the world (seen and unseen) as they understood it. They were influenced by weather, animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diego Matadamas Gomora. Angel Gonzalez Lopez.

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. Many images in the iconographic corpus from Pre-Hispanic Basin of Mexico belong to forms which were created and reproduced either in codices, mural painting, ceramics, and sculpture. Some examples are the attires of deities, specific icons used to represent natural elements, like rain, comets, even the Sun, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ewa Dutkiewicz. Sibylle Wolf. Nicholas J. Conard.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The human body plays a significant role in constructing identity. According to Bourdieu (1974, 1976), the habitus, displays the social status and the role of the individual within a society. Group membership manifests itself with symbols like personal ornaments, the choice of emblematic objects, and their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Saunders.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Visualization of artifacts is a key element of archaeology and the dissemination of information. Although technology has improved exponentially in the past few decades, the ethical use of such visual depictions of artifacts have not caught up to the degree of information these images have the potential to convey. Here, I examine recent trends in the use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Pool.

This is an abstract from the "Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The greenstone figure known as the Tuxtla Statuette is significant as one of 12 objects with an Epi-Olmec text, and the first to be described in the scholarly literature. For over a century it was misidentified as having been recovered from the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, near the town of San Andrés Tuxtla, Veracruz. The author...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia McAnany.

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. Theory—the workhorse of evidence—is a powerful engine that can revolutionize understanding or create a huge misstep. To theorize the past is to generalize principles and processes of human practice that surpass cultural boundaries. By participating in these larger networks of meaning,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hoopes.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Cooke's pioneering studies in zooarchaeology of the Neotropics have redefined the way that archaeologists, art historians, ethnohistorians, and ethnographers utilize data from faunal remains, not only in the reconstruction of past environments,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Zender.

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. Paleography (from Greek παλαιό- ‘old’ and γράφε ‘writing’) was long understood as the study of the origins and development of signs (e.g., De Montfaucon, Paleaeografica Graeca, 1708), but since the welcome focus on ductus (i.e., shape, stance, and stroke-order in sign-formation)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Paint Rock, Texas (41CC1) is a 300 m. broken limestone bluff along the Concho River that contains dozens of spectacular solar interactions with rock art that was placed there over the course of two millennia. Through five years of observation, the members of the Paint Rock Project have recorded over fifty solar interactions that mark specific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Aguilera. Emily Umberger.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study focuses on questions about serpents and gender associations in Aztec art--questions raised by a ceramic fragment located in storage in the Brooklyn Museum. On it Coyolxauhqui, the enemy of the Aztecs’ supernatural patron, Huitzilopochtli, is depicted with two different types of imaginary serpents, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jackson.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing (ca. AD 250-900, Mexico and Central America) has yielded rich understandings of texts in recent years through increasingly nuanced ways of reading, contextualizing, and interpreting hieroglyphs. Beyond examining hieroglyphic texts as culturally contextualized documentary sources, however,...