Iconography and epigraphy (Other Keyword)

251-275 (287 Records)

Teotihuacan References Found within Classic Maya Inscriptions (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

This paper explores Teotihuacan references found within the corpus of ancient Maya inscriptions. Classic Maya inscriptions analyzed for this investigation were derived from monumental architecture to ceramics. In the last decade more references to Teotihuacan within Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing have surfaced within the archaeological record and in museum collections. However, recently there has not been an in-depth study that analyzes the context of these recently uncovered references....


Textile Production in the Uruk Period: New Insights from Glyptic Imagery (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Pittman.

Production of textiles rose to an industrial level in the late Uruk period of southern Mesopotamia. Iconographic sources found in glyptic art provide a detailed visual description of aspects of this industry. Gender differentiation is clearly institutionalize, with women preparing the thread and skeins while males are engaged in the actual weaving. This paper presents a close analysis of a single motif in the glyptic iconography, offering an explanation of what has previously been identified...


Tibetan Mani Stones and the Materiality of Text (2018)
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...


“Tlaloc” and “Chicomoztoc” in the North: Evidence for Chthonic Concepts from Mesoamerican Cosmovision in the Caves of the Greater Southwest (2021)
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...


Tools Fit for a Queen: Interdisciplinary Study of a Set of Ancient Maya Weaving Implements (2019)
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...


Towards a More Systematic Approach to Analyzing Artistic Influences: A View from the Pacific Coast of Southeastern Mesoamerica (2018)
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...


Transformation of the Gods: Symmetry and the Construction of Mesoamerican Deity Systems in the Middle Formative (2018)
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...


Transportation or Transformation?: Road Depictions in Relaciones Geográficas of 16th-Century New Spain (2019)
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...


Tribute Lists and Bureaucrats: Understanding Classic Maya Politics (2023)
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...


Tridimensionality, Multimediality, Polychromy, and Other Forms of Visual Complexity in Late Postclassic Mosaic Art (2021)
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....


The Two Pillars of the Kingdom of Bagan, Myanmar: How Royalty and Religion Shaped the Settlement Patterns of an Empire (2018)
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...


Un acercamiento al pensamiento simbólico de los Huastecos, siglos XV y XVI (2018)
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...


Una iconografía estelar en figurillas y esculturas de las culturas del Clásico del Centro de Veracruz (2018)
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...


An Underground Home for Earthly Beings. Reconstructing the Archaeological Context of a Lot of Mesoamerican Mosaic Encrusted Artifacts in the National Museum of the American Indian Collections (2018)
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...


Understanding the Ritual of Peri-abandonment Deposit Behavior Evidenced by Late Classic Maya Figurines at the Site of Baking Pot, Cayo District, Belize (2019)
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...


Unpacking the Dishes: The Agency of (mis)Translation in the Hybrid Ceramics of Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (2019)
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,...


The Uses of Stylistic Analysis in Rock Art Studies (2019)
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...


Using Architectural Sculpture to Think about Center and Periphery in the Puuc Region (2019)
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...


Using Rules from the Texas Lower Pecos to Interpret Jornada Mogollon Rock Art (2018)
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...


Venerating Death and Fertility: Implications of Late Terminal Classic Maya Use of Monuments with Skeletal Imagery (2021)
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...


Virgin Puebloan and Fremont Rock Art at Petroglyph Corral (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Musser-Lopez.

Though routine interaction may not have been the case, the Fremont were a part of the iconic world of the Virgin (Anasazi) Puebloan people who occupied southeastern Nevada north of Las Vegas in Evergreen Flats, 75 miles northwest the Lower Colorado River’s north end bend. Within that region is Petroglyph Corral visually demonstrating Puebloan people at a Fremont fringe area where the two cultures may have competed, collided or even collapsed into one another and the more recent Numic tribes. ...


Wari Bats? An Iconographic Analysis of Some Very Curious Zoomorphic Figures on Middle Horizon Andean Pottery (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Vazquez De Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For ancient civilizations with no form of writing, proper iconographic interpretation is an important tool for accessing the past. This is certainly true of ancient Andean civilizations, especially the Wari who produced some of the most captivating visual imagery of their time. However, Wari depictions of supernatural composite figures are so stylized that...


Warriors and Violence in the Iconography of Chichén Itzá (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Nelda Issa Marengo.

En Mesoamérica las representaciones gráficas sobre guerra, violencia y conflicto, son una constante que se encuentran en diversos sitios y en diferentes periodos. Para el Epiclásico (650-900 A.D) en el centro de México, y para el Clásico Tardío/ Terminal (600-900 A.D) en el área Maya, esta temática comienza a presentar cambios, tiende a ser más explícita y a compartir algunos elementos entre sitios contemporáneos. Chichén Itzá floreció durante este momento de cambios y muestra de ello es la...


Wars of the Western Maya Kings: Military Conflicts in Lacandon Selva at the Turn of the Seventh to Eighth Centuries (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Safronov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last quarter of the seventh century was marked by the intensification of military and political struggle in the Ususmasinta Basin. Loss of control over the Western Lowlands by Kaanu’l power at this time led to wars between the largest political centers of the region—Piedras Negras, Palenque, Yaxchilan, Tonina, and Saktz’i. The Lacandon Selva (Chiapas...


Water, Ritual, and Prosperity at the Medieval Capital of Bagan, Myanmar (11th to 14th Centuries CE): Preliminary Exploration of the Tuyin-Thetso "Water Mountain" and the Nat Yekan Sacred Water Tank (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Gyles Iannone. Pyiet Phyo Kyaw. Nyien Chan Soe. Saw Tun Lynn. Scott Macrae.

The IRAW@Bagan project is aimed at developing an integrated socio-ecological history for residential patterning, agricultural practices, and water management at the Medieval Burmese (Bama) capital of Bagan, Myanmar (11th to 14th century CE). As part of this long-term research program investigations have been initiated on the Tuyin-Thetso mountain range, located 11.25 km southeast of Bagan’s walled and moated epicenter. This upland area figures prominently in the chronicles of early Bagan, and...