Iconography and Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanette Nicewinter.

Paintings on fineware ceramic vessels and spoons by the pre-Hispanic Cajamarca culture of the north highlands of present-day Peru emphasize an abstracted and expressionistic aesthetic unlike their north coast neighbors, the Transitional Moche culture, and their contemporaries, the Wari state. During the Middle Horizon (c. 600 - 1000 CE), the Cajamarca culture's paintings developed a greater emphasis on human and animal imagery while maintaining an abstraction of forms. The figures are reduced to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Aguilar-Moreno.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The monastery of Acolman founded by the Augustinian order is located near Teotihuacan. The most astonishing tequitqui (Amerindian-Christian art of the sixteenth century) monument in Acolman is the atrial cross made in 1550. Although open-air crosses existed in Europe, the Mexican crosses have a different iconography...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerome Offner.

This is an abstract from the "The Mexica Royal Court: A Symposium in Honour of Alfredo López Austin" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multispectral and spectroscopic analysis of key sixteenth century graphic manuscripts, especially Mapa Quinatzin and Codex Xolotl, combined with the often-confused alphabetic sources dependent on them, are presented. New methods of digital annotation of the surface of such graphic manuscripts, or on any information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Carrasco.

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. Interpretations of sprouting imagery and phytomorphic deities in Mesoamerican iconography have often turned to maize. Although maize informs Maya art and is personified as the Maya Maize God, imagery from elsewhere in Mesoamerica is often less...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Hegmon. Kari Schleher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mimbres Black-on-white pottery from the US Southwest is well known for its beautiful designs and, sadly, also for problems such as looting, fakery, and collection bias. Previous work has documented some of the challenges. The current work develops practical means by which those challenges can be addressed, drawing on a database of Mimbres pottery with designs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cloud iconography has been present on Mesoamerican material culture since the Formative Period and often appears with iconography that is associated with water rituals and rain entities. This paper will present new perspectives on the relationships between ancient Mesoamerican rain deities through a study of rain cloud iconography. I trace the appearance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Milbrath.

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. Animals are prominent in annual rituals performed at the end of the year, as seen on page 49-52 of the Codex Borgia. Animals attacking each other and scenes of struggle involving animals and anthropomorphic gods are related to sequences in the yearbearer cycle that define the Calendar Round. Yearbearer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Kristan-Graham.

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. At the Postclassic Maya city of Chichen Itza, buildings, planned spaces, and imagery blend with the landscape to form meta-narratives. One instance is the Sacred Cenote, a limestone sinkhole that was a major focus of rituals. The cenote rim features frogs/toads carved from the living rock, and at one time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dye.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation I discuss beliefs that focus on "supernatural" animals and associated charter myths, regalia, and ceramic effigies. Three forms of transcendental animals are evident in eastern North America: animal masters, guardian animals, and masters of animals. Animal masters control the availability and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Brittenham.

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. Chichen Itza was a city of unprecedented visual complexity in ancient Mesoamerica, a place where innovations in architecture, mural painting, and sculpture, as well as experiments with new media such as gold and turquoise, created an urban landscape unlike any other. In this paper, I will examine the interactions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Brittenham.

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 II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We often talk about the connections between Chichen Itza and Tula, but these two great cities were far from alone in the ancient Mesoamerican world. In this presentation, I will explore artistic and architectural similarities between Chichen Itza and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Caplan.

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. The working of precious materials—greenstones, shells, turquoise, gold, and feathers—represented an arena of artistic specialization and tailored, technological expertise among the Late Postclassic Nahuas. Such specialized productions were almost exclusively destined to serve as components of multimedia costumes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivonne Reyes Carlo.

Una constante en la Costa del Golfo es utilizar elementos de deidades del Altiplano (Tláloc por ejemplo) para interpretar las representaciones de seres con características sobrenaturales pertenecientes a esta área de estudio. Si bien, podrían existir rasgos iconográficos que justificaran esas semejanzas no podemos únicamente traslapar elementos similares entre unas imágenes y otras ya que sólo se obtiene una propuesta parcial sobre su interpretación y tal vez nos aleje de su significado...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Rutecki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much of the research and scholarship in Southeastern iconography focused on birds and avian or avian anthropomorphic imagery emphasizes connections to warfare, especially raptors and woodpeckers. While some research has discussed how birds relate to broader patterns in iconography, notable gaps in literature exist pertaining to how birds are integrated into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frances Berdan.

This is an abstract from the "The Mexica Royal Court: A Symposium in Honour of Alfredo López Austin" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the role of material things in the lives and fortunes of Aztec kings in the latter years of the Triple Alliance empire. Royal things ranged from expansive palaces (very big things) to a wide array of specific styles of clothing and body adornments. Exquisitely crafted and well-chosen things...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Milbrath.

This is an abstract from the "The Mexica Royal Court: A Symposium in Honour of Alfredo López Austin" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A painting in the Ambras Castle (Innsbruck), dating between 1538 and 1556, includes a previously unrecognized portrait of Moctezuma’s son, don Pedro. This identification is based on comparisons with the Codex Cozcatzin (1v), which represents the place glyph of Tenochtitlan and the emperor Moctezuma with his daughter,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherra Wyllie.

This is an abstract from the "Los Rituales del Juego de Pelota en la Costa del Golfo / Ballgame Rituals in the Gulf Lowlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In south-central Veracruz, representations of ballplayers, captives, kings, and queens defy clear categorizations, made more complex by costume and gender designations, hierarchical proportion, natural sexual dimorphism, and symbolic roles versus historic portraiture; distinctions that may be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Tritsch.

A striking example of the sophistication of the vitreous materials industry at the time it was produced, a faience bead depicting Tutankhamun drinking from a white lotus chalice possesses tremendous symbolic meaning that reflects the mores of the ancient Egyptian culture of the time. Although a published piece from the Eton College Collection, this is the first time extensive research has been performed on this unprovenanced artifact bought on the antiquities market in the late 1800s. Production...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

Recent study of an hacha from Classic-period Veracruz in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals that hachas and palmas may have been used as costume elements in ritual performances related to the ballgame. As costume elements, these sculptures would have allowed actors to assume the identity of captives, rulers, or deities. This accords well with iconographic evidence of ballgame-related ritual performances in Veracruz, and suggests comparisons with artworks from other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angel González López. Jeremy Coltman. Karl A. Taube. Travis Stanton.

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. Heart sacrifice constituted one of the most basic yet fundamental tenets of Mesoamerican ritual practice. At Early Postclassic Chichen Itza, as with the later Aztec of Tenochtitlan, hearts and blood were offered to the bellicose solar deity whose daily journey through the sky not only depended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Miller.

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. One might think that the 2013 publication of Miller and Brittenham on Bonampak would have closed discussion of these paintings for a few years. But the complexity and richness of the subject continues to yield both details and to add to the big picture of the three-room program of late 8th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brown.

This is an abstract from the "Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Focused stylistic analysis over the past 60 years has made clear that graphic depiction of the creative forces became a vehicle of artistic expression for southeastern societies. Between the 1100s and 1400 such expression was nearly ubiquitous by including, without being confined to, pottery surfaces, marine shell, sheet...

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 Michael Mathiowetz.

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the key issues in the study of the Flower World complex is determining the chronology and nature of its transmission from Mesoamerica to the U.S. Southwest. Scholars contend that the most clear material culture and symbolic evidence indicates that the Flower World was present in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Robles.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Looting is a significant issue in archaeology, particularly in the Andes, where it has led to the decontextualization of numerous archaeological artifacts. This paper presents a case study on an Andean figurine dressed in beautiful textiles that was donated to the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1940. The figurine and its textiles...