Iconography and Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Sears.

This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation explores how miniature ceramic figurines were incorporated into the daily lives, rituals and intentions of the Late Classic period Maya of the Alta Verapaz region. Ceramic figurines are also the remnants of Maya musical instrumentation and have been recovered from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tsuimei Huang.

This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jade ear ornaments with human-animal motif, dating to 2800-2300 BP, have been the most distinctive jewelry from prehistoric Taiwan. Since the first ear ornament of this kind became known in 1982, a total of 41 pieces of such items have been unearthed from 9 archaeological sites. These objects are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Wingfield.

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. Dotted grids abound in art of Pacific Nicaragua southward through Costa Rica and Panama to Ecuador, whether on painted and incised ceramic vessels or chiseled stone sculptures. These images reflect ancient fiber arts now lost to the elements in these tropical lands. The designs, recorded on clay and stone, appear to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Stanley. Tara D. Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Formerly identified cosmograms for the Olmec culture include the Dallas Plaque and the Las Limas figure. Politically, this vision is centered by Olmec rulers which is visible through the iconographic interpretations of works including La Venta Altar 4, Oxtotlitlan Mural 1, among others. These interpretations build on the work of previous scholars and are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Nowak.

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. Dr. Kent F. Reilly and many of the scholars associated with the Mississippian Iconography Workshop have used ethnography and folklore to support interpretations about ritual and cosmology. This talk discusses how ancient landscapes can, in turn, inform folklore, ritual communication, and iconography....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Henderson.

This paper examines the foreign connections evidenced by the material record of Early Classic Kaminaljuyu. The author discusses the ways in which public art, architecture, and elite funerary contexts evolved at Kaminaljuyu during this time, evaluating how these changing styles may have tied into evolving relationships with distant sites and regions such as Teotihuacan, Veracruz, and the Maya lowlands. The Early Classic relationship between Kaminaljuyu and Teotihuacan has, in many ways, eclipsed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marlen Hinojosa. Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers. Matthew Des Lauriers.

Offering 1 from Los Horcones is an assemblage of figurine masks, whistles, rattles and vessels that offers an interesting opportunity for analysis that provides information of the auditory, olfactory, and visual experience of this small ritual. The offering, initially thought to be simply a collection of figurines and masks, were later discovered to be whistles—small musical instruments whose simplicity belies the importance of the meanings they encoded. Experimental archaeological analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Chiykowski-Rathke.

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. Archaeologists have largely defined the Trincheras Tradition by pottery, in particular the distribution of purple painted ceramics. The purple pigment, found in both specular and non-specular forms, was part of a bichrome and polychrome regional tradition that flourished across the Sonoran Desert between 700-1200 AD. Many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Barker. Samantha Fladd. Kelley Hays-Gilpin.

Widespread archaeological evidence—including egg shells and skeletal remains recovered from archaeological sites as well as imagery on pottery, kiva murals, and rock art—suggests that macaws, their feathers, and their imagery played important roles in ancient Puebloan society. Ethnographic accounts also indicate the importance of macaws to ancient Puebloan peoples and modern groups. Macaws have been interpreted as indicators of exchange, aspects of intricate ritual systems, and indexes of social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Naudinot. Michel Le Goffic. Elena Man-Estier. Patrick Paillet.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Succeeding the Magdalenian, the Azilian is one of the last techno-complexes of the Western Europe Upper Paleolithic. This period is characterized by major socio-cultural changes illustrated by techno-economic but also symbolic changes. One of the most famous elements of this process is the abandonment of naturalistic figurative art on portable pieces or on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Cheek.

Dress is an object made up of other objects. I combine a practice approach with the chaîne opératoire and behavior chains methods to analyze technical and social acts involving dress objects. The analysis starts with one segment of the actions involving dress—the actual act of dressing. The study includes only court scenes that appear to memorialize historic events, although some of the observations and conclusions can be applied to other kinds of scenes and other media. After identifying the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorraine Williams-Beck.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rampant idolatry and Mayan resistance to the religious conquest, narrated in Early Viceregal Yucatan documents, bespeaks an underlying visual component for continuing traditional religious practices. Franciscan rural chapels, churches, and convents interior mural paintings and architectural facade sculptural details provide the material signatures to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katarzyna Radnicka-Dominiak.

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. The revealing of Chajul mural paintings has opened a completely new chapter in the history of colonial art of Latin America. Most of today’s known examples of colonial art are located in churches or other buildings related to religious spheres, while Chajul murals cover walls of private houses of Ixil Maya families. Not only the location of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fash. Nawa Sugiyama. Barbara Fash. Mariela Pérez Antonio. Alexis Hartford.

Two distinct excavation contexts from Front D in the Plaza of the Columns Complex yielded pictorial representations in different artistic media that strongly suggest the presence of Maya artists in Plaza 50, decades prior to the famous Teotihuacan "Entrada" of 378 C.E. in the Petén. Excavations at this civic-administrative structure at the heart of the ceremonial core of Teotihuacan have revealed a sequence of numerous plaster floors in Plaza 50 associated with Structure 44, whose form is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

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. Among Michael Coe’s many contributions to Maya studies with his landmark show and publication “The Maya Scribe and His World” was the observation that imagery on Classic Maya ceramics is different from imagery on carved stone monuments. Coe notes this gap between ceramic and stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie Carreón Blaine.

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. The purpose of this collaboration is to present the results of the analysis of a human skull located at the center of the ball court of Santa Rosa, Chiapas, and to review the implications it presents for the study of the Mesoamerican ball game and its relationship to human sacrifice. It is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cyrus Banikazemi.

The ethnohistoric and archaeological records provide ample evidence of the ideological significance of metals and pigments in the pre-Columbian Andean world. This study explores the use of these materials in the complex decorative techniques utilized by the Inca when finishing stone vessels.This research integrates data generated from ethnohistoric sources, portable X-Ray Fluorescent (pXRF) tests, and reconstructive experimentation in order to provide a better understanding of how metals and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Rodríguez.

This study explores a recurrent problem in the archaeological field. How to start the analysis of archaeological material? Specifically, how to analyze a ceramic sample stylistically? Based on research carried out at the Cerro de Oro archaeological site on the south coast of Peru, the author proposes a methodology that covers identifiable aspects in most data groups. The study of decorative techniques, the identification of iconographic designs and the observation of distribution patterns will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leszek Pawlowicz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern methods of 3D characterization, like photogrammetry and structured light scanning, can capture high-resolution models of inscribed surfaces. Visualization and enhancement of surface details on these models can be limited by the computational requirements for manipulating high face and vertex counts. We present several methods for working around...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Tate.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the most elaborate tomblike deposits at La Venta may commemorate a female ritualist, possibly a midwife. This paper explores the contents and surroundings of Tomb C and relates them to the widespread imagery of women and pre-birth humans at this Middle Formative ritual and pilgrimage site. It uses analogies with Mixe ritual as evidence for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Larry Steinbrenner.

This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The beautiful polychrome ceramics of Pacific Nicaragua’s Sapoá period (800–1300 CE) have long been touted as the southernmost manifestation of the Mixteca-Puebla phenomenon in lower Central America. Traditionally, these ceramics have been treated as de facto cultural markers of two independent migrant groups of Mesoamerican...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madelaine Azar.

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. Symbolically charged ceramic rim-effigy bowls, characterized by figural head and tail adornments, are hallmarks of the Late Mississippian period in the central Mississippi River valley (CMV). Hundreds of whole rim-effigy bowls, most often depicting serpents, birds, or humans, have been collected at sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew D. Turner.

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 I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As numerous studies have noted, changes in themes, compositions, and content in Maya stone monuments from the ninth and tenth centuries present a departure from their Classic counterparts, which in turn appears to reflect changes in social structure and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Tritsch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Receiving little scholarly attention to date, most prior work on the tomb of Amenemhet at Beni Hasan has either focused on the translation of the titles and autobiography inscribed in and around the door jamb or on the description of the tomb scenes and accompanying decorations. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of this richly decorated structure,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandre Tokovinine.

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. This paper explores a set of mythical narratives on Classic Maya pottery (550-800 C.E.), which involve Huk Si’ip, the divine keeper of animals, and Itzam Kokaaj, the celestial creator of animals. Most of these narratives form part of a larger theogony cycle where the elderly gods of animals, sky, earth, and fire...