Iconography and Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laurie Webster.

This is an abstract from the "The Precolumbian Dotted-Diamond-Grid Pattern: References and Techniques" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dotted-diamond-grid pattern first appears on the textiles and pottery of the southwestern United States in the mid-AD 1000s or early AD 1100s. Fifteenth-century kiva murals from the northern Southwest confirm the importance of this design system for decorating ceremonial cloth prior to Spanish contact. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin.

The murals of Cacaxtla, Tlaxcala, have long thrown the issue of Central Mexico-Maya interaction into high relief. There we find the richest evidence of interaction between these two cultural zones, though whether this amounts to citation, appropriation, fusion, or immigration is open to debate and contestation. This paper re-examines the stairway murals of the Red Temple for what they tell us about a Maya world seen through a Central Mexican lens. A particular focus falls on the link between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Lozano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Varying facets of ancient Maya visual expression have long documented cultural elements of identity, political relationships, and social organization. These components manifest in a spectrum of archaeological material and cultural remains. Within the abundant regions and polities, evidence suggests the existence of local artistic and scribal traditions....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Howell. Paul Nick Kardulias.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study examines stylistic and thematic variation as seen in a sample of P51 type Viking Age (approx. AD 700-1100) oval brooches excavated mostly from burial contexts in central Sweden. As examples of applied art heavily reproduced through casting and imitation, paired oval brooches have the potential to reveal a great deal about how artisans perceived...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Whittlesey. Jefferson Reid.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Subjective color is a well-known phenomenon in the psychology of perception. It results when certain patterns of dark and light are spun at a particular speed, which the viewer perceives as solid colors or rainbow effects. Experiments indicate that this phenomenon occurs when Mimbres Black-on-white vessels of certain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan O'Neil.

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. Examining multiple media, this paper addresses depicted and actual surfaces in ancient Maya art in order to explore artistic engagements with surface, texture, and the sense of touch. It considers, for example, how certain artists rendered bodies, objects, and materials in manners conveying the look and feel of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bretton Giles. Brian Rowe. Ryan Parish.

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation explores the significance of the Middle Woodland burials found on the lower floor under Mound 2 at the Hopewell Earthworks, including their grave goods, mortuary furniture, spatial patterning, and postmortem treatment. It investigates how certain aspects of these burials’ ceremonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryohei Takatsuchi. Karina López Hernández. Víctor Cortés Meléndez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-Columbian material and visual culture encapsulate ideologies and symbolism of the Mesoamerican past. Birds play important roles in Mesoamerican societies, both as daily sources of food and in symbolic and ideological contexts found in ceramic and sculptural iterations combined with archaeological and zooarchaeological contexts. This paper will examine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Baquedano.

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. Frogs and toads were important animals in Mesoamerica with several species of Mexican frogs. They were especially associated with the rainy season. Some species of frogs are active above ground only in the reproductive period while some species of toads spend part of the year underground. These batrachians are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lois Martin.

This is an abstract from the "The Precolumbian Dotted-Diamond-Grid Pattern: References and Techniques" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several precolumbian royal garments with simple, repeating geometric designs have explicit associations to maize, and hint at a deep significance to the cloth pattern–corn plant connection. In the Andes, Inca Coyas (noblewomen) wore special woven belts during the annual corn-planting ceremony. Sophie Desrosiers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rex Koontz.

This presentation investigates the narrative context of a Tajín region deity whose diagnostic characteristics include a large hank of hair and an extended upper lip. The figure appears in narrative scenes with the major Tajín deities, often playing what seems to be a subsidiary role. The most important association in these scenes is with a liquid-filled temple that plays a key role scenes of ballcourt ritual. The same deity appears in pars pro toto representations of sacrificial scenes with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Milbrath.

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. Ritual violence is well represented in the Codex Borgia, a masterpiece from early sixteenth-century Central Mexico. Narrative scenes depict Venus gods alongside deities honored during seasonal *veintena festivals known from the Valley of Mexico and Tlaxcala. The Aztec Tlacaxipehualiztli festival...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 1" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the Huasteca belongs to the Mesoamerican culture area and the Gulf Coast region, some scholars have asserted that its culture, emblematized by its sculptural tradition, was isolated. The examination of Huastec stone sculptures from different periods reveals not only its links to other artistic traditions in Mesoamerica but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Michael Carrasco.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 1" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through the lens of “conceptual convergence,” we examine the multiple symbolic strands that inform specific Gulf Coast sculptural images, focusing especially on the Tenaxpi Egg/Homshuk sculpture. This sculpture, excavated on Tenaxpi Island in Lake Catemaco, shows a figure sculpted on an egg-shaped stone. This image likely references...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Doyle.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In “The Maya Scribe and His World”, Michael D. Coe recognized a “Maya artist of enormous distinction” when analyzing the hand of the painter of the codex-style drinking cup now known as the Metropolitan Vase. This presentation is a reexamination of individual hands in the codex style...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Carrasco. Joshua Englehardt.

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. In this paper we examine the complex iconography of the Papaloapan Stela (originally labeled by Stirling as Cerro de las Mesas Stela 2) with a particular focus on the narrative integrity of the tableaux, the depiction of speech, and the relationship between the visualization of language and possible glyphic texts. Our...