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 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 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 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 Karen Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Like many archaeologists, the late Bettye J. Broyles discovered what she wanted to do in her twenties while enrolled in college. It was there where Broyles’s archaeological career began to take shape, and by summer of 1954 she had embarked on her first field school. Broyles went on...

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 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 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 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 Cyrus Banikazemi.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This preliminary study explores how pigments were sourced and manufactured in the Moquegua valley of southern Peru. The ethnohistoric and archaeological records provide ample evidence of the economic, religious, and social significance of colors and pigments in the pre-Columbian Andean world; however, there currently exists little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonah Augustine.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will examine the aesthetic and affective construction of political subjectivities within the Tiwanaku state (AD 500-1100). Based on evidence for feasting within the ceremonial core of Tiwanaku and a detailed analysis of the polychrome serving wares that were consumed at these events, I will argue that large-scale rituals were sites at which “common...