Iconography and epigraphy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Crandall. Timothy Galowicz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster summarizes several years of investigations into painted rock representation and its social context within the Utcubamba Basin, Amazonas, Eastern Peru. This poster has three aims. The first, to provide an overview of the Utcubamba basin’s forms of painted rock representation. This is significant to a broader history of the region as there are...

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 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 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 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 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 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 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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Buck Woodard. Danielle Moretti-Langholtz.

This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Popularly known as “Powhatan’s Mantle,” the shell-decorated and sewn animal skins are an iconic object of material culture from seventeenth-century Virginia. On display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, we argue that the Mantle’s provenance and possible links to Indigenous cosmology have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Jordan.

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 paper examines the predatory animals on the relief friezes of Pyramid B at Tula, clearly based on Teotihuacan models originally expressed in different media and contexts--murals in interior spaces--and the possible reasons for both Tula's borrowing of this imagery and its redeployment in sculpture in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Lévy.

Pyro-engraved gourds discovered by the "Nasca Project" (CEAP) in Cahuachi, Nasca ceremonial center located in the basin of Río Grande, can provide new data about their manufacture and decoration. From a comparative perspective, we study artifact characteristics and archaeological records to understand an unusually large and complex pyro-engraved found during 1994 excavations as an offering associated with ceramics from the last phase of the Early Horizon (Ocucaje 8-9) and the beginning of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Ryan. Elsa Cencig. Susan Lofthouse. Tommy Weetaluktuk.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, the Canadian government nominated eight places as candidates for future designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. One of those is Qajartalik, located off the coast of Nunavik, where more than 180 anthropomorphic faces were carved into soapstone outcrops between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Umberger.

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. Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent) is often characterized as a wind god, but in Aztec sculptures, the traits of the wind god Ehecatl, principally the buccal mouth mask, are not found mixed with feathered serpent imagery. The mix is found in pictorial manuscripts, and alluded to in written...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeb Card.

Certain classes of material culture found in Honduras and El Salvador have long been recognized as being related to "Maya style" artwork and artifacts from Copan and Classic Maya cities to the north and west. These objects have been framed through questions of "influence", ethnicity, and boundaries. The recent re-analysis of a ceramic flask from Tazumal, with an unusual inscription tying the object to a Copan king and imagery of tribute, suggests a more distinct political lens through which to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig. Larry Loendorf. Julie Francis.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Greybull South (48BH92) is a rock art site located along the east bank of the Bighorn River near Greybull, Wyoming. The site was first documented in 1951 as part of the Yellowtail Reservoir survey project, but the site gained regional notoriety in 1962 when large blocks containing petroglyphs were removed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Mollenhauer.

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. Studies of feathered serpent imagery during Mesoamerica's Formative Period range widely in their conclusions, with little agreement about the parameters of inquiry, associated iconographic conventions, or even what constitutes a "feathered" serpent. Images of serpentine creatures have been...