Iconography and Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aleksandra Laszczka.

Castillo de Huarmey on the north coast of Peru is an archaeological site of pre-Hispanic Middle Horizon period (AD 600-900), widely known for the discovery of the first undisturbed Wari royal mausoleum. From 2012-2013 remains of fifty-eight elite female individuals were found accompanied by rich ceremonial offerings and grave goods, including textiles. The state of preservation and the condition of a large portion of the fabrics are poor, especially those coming from the primary burial contexts....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Mazariegos.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 2: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation, I will recount my trajectory influenced by John Pohl during the formative undergraduate years of my art history training at UCLA, taking into account his teaching, the connections between the University of California (UC) and the California Community Colleges (CCC), and the disciplinary tensions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous studies have illustrated the continuing relationship between the Maya area and the Basin of Mexico, especially with the presence of Maya iconography at the site of Teotihuacan. Maya imagery can be seen in diverse cultural materials such as ceramics and stucco-painted murals. For example, researchers have argued that the stucco-painted murals at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomas Barrientos. Ernesto Arredondo Leiva. Julia Guernsey. Diego López García.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The sculptural style known as potbelly (“barrigón”) has been widely documented in archaeological sites in the southern Maya region, from Chiapas to El Salvador, with a few examples in the Lowlands and other areas of Mesoamerica. However, most of these monuments are concentrated in sites occupied during the Late Preclassic period on the Guatemalan Pacific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Lambert. Timothy Perttula. Nilesh Gaikwad.

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. Recent absorbed residue studies have confirmed that ceramic and shell containers were used for consuming Datura in precolumbian times. Until now, no one has identified what tools precolumbian people used to produce a concentrated hallucinogenic concoction. In this study, we used mass spectrometry to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Polly Schaafsma.

The Tablita Dance, commonly known as the Corn Dance, is a well-known event among the Rio Grande Pueblos where, in connection with saint’s days, it is performed during the growing season. The corn dance may occur at other times as well, but without a linkage to the village patron saint. A number of diverse factors, however, indicate that this dance as known today is a post-Hispanic aspect of Pueblo ceremonialism. In addition to the dance’s obvious link to the Catholic patron saint of each...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Jordan.

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. This paper examines the predatory animals on the relief friezes of Pyramid B at Tula, clearly based on Teotihuacan models originally expressed in different media and contexts--murals in interior spaces--and the possible reasons for both Tula's borrowing of this imagery and its redeployment in sculpture in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Scarry.

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the indigenous societies of the Eastern Woodlands shared ways of life, they also differed in many important ways so that we cannot view them as a single culture. Even where material cultures and iconography appear to have been shared across great distances and over significant periods of time, the meanings and practices...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Mazzetto.

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. In documentary sources recording Nahuatl culture of the Late Postclassic period, a bird called zollin, identified as a quail (Cyrtonyx montezumae) is especially prominent. Indeed, these small birds were often chosen to be sacrificed before the divine effigies and, in some cases, to be consumed during ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Umberger.

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. Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent) is often characterized as a wind god, but in Aztec sculptures, the traits of the wind god Ehecatl, principally the buccal mouth mask, are not found mixed with feathered serpent imagery. The mix is found in pictorial manuscripts, and alluded to in written...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Travis Stanton. Dominique Meyer. Jose Osorio. Jeremy Coltman. Karl Taube.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we present the results of a program of remote sensing and the digital documentation of the art and architecture of the Maya site of Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. An aerial lidar survey performed in 2014 has aided in creating a more accurate map of the site. Detailed photogrammetry and ground-based liar, performed in the area open for tourism,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Mollenhauer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades debate among Formative scholars has raged over whether to classify Gulf Olmec societies as archaic states or chiefdoms; yet scholars on both sides have assumed that these societies were governed by elites under the jurisdiction of a single hereditary ruler. Stone monuments in the form of altar-thrones, stelae, and—most particularly—colossal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Mollenhauer.

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. Studies of feathered serpent imagery during Mesoamerica's Formative Period range widely in their conclusions, with little agreement about the parameters of inquiry, associated iconographic conventions, or even what constitutes a "feathered" serpent. Images of serpentine creatures have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Ann Monaghan. John Pohl. Manuel Hermann. John Monaghan.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 2: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precolumbian manuscripts provide a view of indigenous life that is largely unmediated by Spanish colonialism. The Colombino-Becker is one of the masterpieces of the Mixtec Codices, but poor preservation, missing pages, and an effort to make the manuscript more palatable in a Christian context by erasing not only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Miller.

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. The striking recumbent stone figure known as a chacmool is a defining feature of the Mesoamerican Terminal Classic and Postclassic, occurring not only at Chichen Itza and Tula, where the largest number of figures is documented, but also in later Mexica...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Gill. Brigitte Kovacevich. Michael Callaghan.

In the late 19th century, explorers identified graffiti etched in stucco walls of residences, palaces, and temples in the Maya Lowlands. By the mid-20th century, scholars acknowledged that the ancient Maya produced these incised images. Today, archaeologists struggle with documenting these instances of graffiti with precision and accuracy, often relying solely on to-scale line drawings to best represent the graffitied image they see before them. These images can be complex, multilayered, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Semon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Mississippian ceramic assemblages from the Georgia coast contain abundant quantities of complicated stamped pottery. Motifs include concentric circles, figure nines, nested squares, and the filfot cross. Recent research tracking filfot cross design variation from assemblages on St. Catherines Island, GA was successful in identifying twelve unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tia Watkins. Rosamund Fitzmaurice. Christophe Helmke. Jaroslaw Zralka. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The precolumbian game of patolli was imbued with ideals of competition, risk, and ritual significance. The board game had a widespread presence across Mesoamerica throughout the Classic period (~ AD 250–820) and was often etched into the surfaces of monumental architecture. Recent excavations led by the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Nuckols-Wilde.

This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-eighth century, Copan’s fifteenth ruler, K’ahk’ Yipyaj Chan K’awiil, oversaw the completion of Structure 10L-26 (or Temple 26), which was crowned with a stone inscription located within the superstructure. This inscription features a parallel display of Maya full-figure glyphs alongside...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Saldaña. Elizabeth Graham.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A significant assemblage of Late to Terminal Classic stucco was discovered at the archaeological site of Lamanai in northern Belize. Originally forming a frieze adorning the upper facade of the palatial Structure N10-28, the stucco fragments are remarkable for their overall preservation and their extensive polychromatic pigmentation. In 2023 a new phase of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fitzhugh. Richard Kortum.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Petroglyph research and archaeology provide different avenues into the past. Commonly viewed as distinct disciplines, they have looked ill-suited to integration (Jacobson 2023). This specific task, however, was a focus of a National Endowment for the Humanities-supported field project conducted by East Tennessee State...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox. Whitney Cox.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been a long-running debate over the function of rock art. The authors provide a definition of prehistoric Southwest Native American religion relating to cyclical time and the cosmos and show how certain aspects of rock art in the American Southwest operate within a greater Mesoamerican ideological and religious worldview.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Hernandez.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the special collections of the Latin American Library at Tulane University is a tracing made by William Spratling of an original *lienzo map centered on the town of Noxtepec, Guerrero. Painted by a *tlacuilo, the *lienzo likely dates to the end of the sixteenth century. This little-known piece exemplifies the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arabella Goodrich. Olivia Navarro-Farr.

In this poster, we explore the production and conservation of mosaics and frescoes, examining their co-occurrence in high elite domestic spaces and how they reveal the varying function(s) of these spaces. Citing both archaeological examples from Villa Cotanello and Villa di San Cesareo, each about a day’s journey from Rome, as well as museum collections, we emphasize the importance of conservation. Standard archaeological practice often consists of removing objects from in situ contexts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annabeth Headrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The city of Chichen Itza has defied attempts to identify individuals who ruled the city and its basic political organization. Scholars once argued for a shared governance system called multepal, basing this assertion on glyphic references to a series of people who apparently jointly held power. Subsequent scholarship challenged this assertion, as revised...