Iconography and Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Clarke.

This is an abstract from the "Heat, Steam, and Health: The Archaeology of the Mesoamerican Pib Naah (Sweat Baths)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sweat baths have been used in Mesoamerica for more than a millennium for humoral medicine, childbirth, and obstetrics, not to mention rituals related to death, birth, and rebirth. During this long period of time, they have held a relatively constant place in mythology; they are ancestral grandmothers who...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Hernandez. Gabrielle Vail.

This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ropes and cords in the form of twisted vegetal fibers, or entwined vegetation or serpent bodies, are a common component of Mesoamerican iconography from the Formative period (1500 BCE–250 CE) into the contact era. They serve a variety of functions such as measuring/framing devices, bindings for captives...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Zubieta Calvert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The artistic expressions of the Ayuujk (Mixe) peoples are little known in Mexican archaeological research. In this presentation I discuss the possible narratives behind the presence of plastic art and rock art, unprecedent in Mesoamérica, located in the context of a subterranean landscape in the Sierra Mixe of Oaxaca. In particular I will focus on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Doyle. Griselda Pérez Robles. Edwin Pérez Robles.

In 2016, a pilot project began for the conservation of sculpted monuments including stelae, altars, and panels at the site of Piedras Negras, Guatemala. Since then, a team in conjunction with the international Proyecto Paisaje Piedras Negras-Yaxchilan has constructed new platforms with roofs to house the monuments, protecting them from further weathering, moisture, and biological agents. The results of the implementation of the innovative system—platforms of powdered lime and local stones,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study will explore the origin and meaning of the Teotihuacan’s year sign headdress and its connection to the Storm God (Tlaloc). Several scholars have noted the first appearance of the year sign worn by the Storm God starting from the Early Classic period at Teotihuacan. Evidence suggests a fair amount of interaction between Teotihuacan and other parts of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

This is an abstract from the "Art, Archaeology, and Science: Investigations in the Guatemala Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological work at the western Guatemalan site of Quen Santo by the Proyecto Arqueológico de la Región de Chaculá (PARCHA) has investigated the chronology of the site and resulted in the discovery of new monuments. In this paper, I present the results of recent study of these monuments. After reviewing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Merideth Paxton.

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. The Dresden Codex is a Postclassic Maya document that is thought to have originated in the Yucatán Peninsula. The opossum figures in the panels at the tops of its section on the New Year (pages 25-28) are associated with the uayeb, the five nameless, unlucky days that mark the ends of the 365-day haabs. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annabeth Headrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the confounding issue of female-gendered images at Teotihuacan. Figures clad in female-gendered clothing appear within Teotihuacan’s most prominent and luxurious arts. Some of the largest sculptures and most precious stone figures are female, and these sculptural images were recovered from highly symbolic, civic spaces. Similarly,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Aquino. Juan Carlos Melendez.

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. We argue that ancient Maya portable mosaic masks, found in high-elite burials across the Maya Lowlands, could have, at some point during the Late Classic period (AD 550–800) and perhaps even earlier, been the ideal insignias of the Kaanul “snake” regime, which in ancient Maya writing is represented by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karl Taube.

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. Among the most striking signs of Olmec iconography is the "double-merlon," this being a horizontal form supporting two parallel, upwardly projecting tabs. This presentation examines and discusses where it appears in Olmec imagery during the Middle Formative period (1000-400 b.c.), stressing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Geurds.

Authenticating relations are defined by artisanship, temporality, value-making and ethnographic authority. These relations are visible in contemporary museum settings as well as in the art world as such, and may be particularly poignant in the case of the Caribbean and Central America with its diverse manifestations of emotive styles and materials such as wood and stone. Historically deep and widespread, 19th and 20th century Central American trafficking of pre-Columbian things was tied to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ringle.

This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From at least the Epiclassic period onward, the Feathered Serpent was frequently accompanied by a Cloud Serpent. In the mythology of the Nahuas he was known as Mixcoatl or Camaxtli in his anthropomorphic form, and was either the father or half-brother of Quetzalcoatl. A patron of the hunt, he...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Mollenhauer.

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. Gulf Olmec sculpture is renowned for the cultural, political, and aesthetic precedents it helped to establish in preconquest Mesoamerica. Often its legacy is discussed in relation to the artistic traditions of succeeding civilizations that emerged to the south and west of Olman. However, there has been little recognition of the impact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luc Doyon. Zhanyang Li. Hui Fang. Francesco d’Errico.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carving a figurine requires the ability to mentally visualize a volume in matter and create symmetries in a three-dimensional space. During the Paleolithic, such objects were likely made to be transported, curated, manipulated, and hung on clothing. Thus far, no instances of three-dimensional portable art were documented in East Asia before the Neolithic. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Perez. Joe Tellez. Andew May. Janet Stock. Alfred Alaniz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The White Shaman Mural, a Pecos River style (PRS) rock art site located in a Pecos River tributary canyon, is dated from 2420 ± 80 to 1460 ± 80 RCYBP (radiocarbon years before present). At that time, prehistoric indigenous hunter-gatherers inhabited this semi-arid environment and traveled seasonally to obtain resources. Research indicates the mural represents...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherra Wyllie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For more than eight decades, numerous ritually interred figurines and skeletal remains have been found in Classic Veracruz architecture. These caches contain tableaus of small, medium, and large-scale ceramic sculpture in conjunction with primary and secondary burials, and deposits of dismembered human bones. Ceramic figures enact scenes depicting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rex Koontz.

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. The presence of maguey in key iconographic programs at the major Classic Veracruz site of El Tajín has been explained largely through a hypothetical pulque cult at the site. This presentation will both extend and debate this interpretation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah McCurdy. M. Kathryn Brown.

In 2016, we discovered a sage’s chamber in the El Castillo acropolis at the ancient Maya site of Xunantunich, Belize. In the Late Classic Tut Building on the east side of El Castillo, all interior and exterior plaster walls are incised with "graffiti." The total number of elements documented is nearly 300 with themes ranging from human and animal forms to glyphs and multi-figure scenes. We expect to encounter more in future field seasons. Based on a variety of factors, we view this as practice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Vivian.

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's long and productive anthropological career has been characterized by her use of art as a means to better interpret the social and organizational characteristics of several prehistoric and historic societies in the American Southwest. Her research has ranged geographically from the northern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyce De Carteret. Diana Magaloni Kerpel.

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. Maya polychrome ceramics have long been regarded for the distinctive regional styles that emerged during the Late Classic period (ca. 600–900 CE). These styles, aligned with royal workshops and their patrons, encompass a wide range of aesthetic strategies, particularly with respect to color. Some workshops and their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elodie Dupey.

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. Through the analysis of several examples of Nahua artistic expression, including the mural paintings of Tlaxcala, the Borgia Group codices, and a wood sculpture encrusted with mosaic, this paper aims to demonstrate that the societies of Late Postclassic central Mexico cultivated a strong interest in polychromy,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Szumilewicz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The primacy of textiles as the preeminent expressive medium of identity and alterity is well documented in Andean prehistory. Based on the study of three types of textiles including tapestry woven patches and painted cloth housed in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin as they compare to mixed-media mounted canvases found in situ at the site Sicán, this paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Jordan.

Classic Maya stelae have been proposed as precursors for the Early Postclassic stelae at Tula and the relief pillars of Pyramid B at the site in previous scholarship. While suggested Maya connections for the Tula stelae are often overstated, and local central Mexican stela traditions as well as ideas from Oaxaca and Guerrero also probably contributed to the genesis of these monuments, the role of Maya contacts remains plausible. Here I explore possible Maya analogs, including stelae, for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter.

This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Feathered Serpent was one of the principal Mesoamerican deities before the Spanish Conquest. During the Epiclassic and Postclassic periods, the cult dedicated to this ancient deity, associated with wind, fertility, and rulership, became firmly established within an international elite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharisse McCafferty. Geoffrey McCafferty.

Pacific Nicaragua has long been noted as a cultural crossroads, especially featuring historically documented migrants from central Mexico. Following ethnohistorical accounts, Nahuat speaking groups colonized the Rivas area in the Late Postclassic Ometepe period. The most prominent diagnostic ceramic of this time was Luna Polychrome, often found in mortuary contexts. This paper presents a detailed analysis of over 50 Luna vessels from the Mi Museo collection. The overarching theme of the painted...