Iconography and Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Evans. Linda Gregonis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. All cultures use symbols to convey ideas. In archaeological contexts those symbols have become ways to define and differentiate archaeological cultures. But what did the symbols mean to the artisans who created them? The art that Hohokam craftspeople produced embodied the world (seen and unseen) as they understood it. They were influenced by weather, animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diego Matadamas Gomora. Angel Gonzalez Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many images in the iconographic corpus from Pre-Hispanic Basin of Mexico belong to forms which were created and reproduced either in codices, mural painting, ceramics, and sculpture. Some examples are the attires of deities, specific icons used to represent natural elements, like rain, comets, even the Sun, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ewa Dutkiewicz. Sibylle Wolf. Nicholas J. Conard.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The human body plays a significant role in constructing identity. According to Bourdieu (1974, 1976), the habitus, displays the social status and the role of the individual within a society. Group membership manifests itself with symbols like personal ornaments, the choice of emblematic objects, and their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Aguilera. Emily Umberger.

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 study focuses on questions about serpents and gender associations in Aztec art--questions raised by a ceramic fragment located in storage in the Brooklyn Museum. On it Coyolxauhqui, the enemy of the Aztecs’ supernatural patron, Huitzilopochtli, is depicted with two different types of imaginary serpents, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elliot Lopez-Finn.

The Postclassic Mexica maintained what Sophia and Michael Coe (2005) refer to as a "curious ambivalence" regarding cacao: despite its prevalence in everyday life as currency, the plant rarely appears in artistic programs and consumption was highly restricted via sumptuary laws that controlled social behavior. The visual scarcity of this crop extends into divine imagery – for instance, cacao remained an important aspect of Ek’ Chuah, the Postclassic Maya merchant god, but does not appear among...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesper Nielsen. Christophe Helmke. Fiorella Fenoglio.

Ever since the first attempts to explain the close correspondences (in iconography, architecture, and writing) between Chichen Itza and Tula in the Early Postclassic it has been assumed that it was mainly between these two cities, sometimes even called "twin Tollans", that the extended and intense contact between Northern Yucatan and central Mexico took place. A tendency among Mesoamericanists not to look further to the north and west, to present states such as Guanajuato and Querétaro, have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana García Barrios.

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. The Grolier exhibition commissioned by M. Coe in 1973 came to researchers as an inescapable reference that remains today. His studies on codex-style vessels, so defined by him, opened the door to new studies from different perspectives and approaches that are reviewed here. This study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only India Kotis. Jenna Hurtubise.

The choices groups make in the type of decorative techniques and styles on ceramics are referential to key components of a group’s social structure. This research examines social aspects of the Casma and Chimú using a cognitive approach in analyzing iconographic elements on elite ceramics from Pan de Azucár, located in the Nepeña Valley, Peru. Casma ceramics are locally made vessels where no two are alike and are characteristically defined by the presence of circle-and-dot and serpentine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Critchley.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 2018 Patipampa excavations at Huari resulted in the discovery of a wealth of remarkable artifacts with potentially far-reaching implications for our understanding of Middle Horizon iconography, including a small bone pendant from a possible gallery space. This bone pendant was noted for a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Clark.

During the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1200-1520) in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, aesthetic qualities of ceramics were utilized as both decorative values and tools for negotiating the creation of group identities and ideologies within communities. Through a stylistic analysis of Yanhuitlan Red on Cream type ceramics recovered from excavations at the site of Etlatongo, in the Nochixtlán Valley, I explore how these vessels and the motifs depicted on them were used during the creation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Billie Follensbee.

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. As ancient cultures throughout the world developed textiles, knotted and woven fabrics lent themselves to the development of geometric rhombus patterns, first as the diamond-shaped mesh of knotted nets and later as square patterns in twined gauze and plain-weave cloth. Further early experimentation in basketry and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giles Morrow. Jesse Spencer-Smith. Yuechen Yang. Mubarak Ganiyu.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the absence of a written language, the study of the complex narrative iconography of the Moche or Mochica culture of the North Coast of Perú (250-900CE) forms an important foundation of our understanding of the cultural dynamics and ritual traditions of this Pre-Columbian society. Fineline iconography on Moche ceramic vessels in museum and private...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Budar.

El corredor costero al este de Los Tuxtlas, delimitado por los Volcanes de Santa Marta y San Martín Pajapan, el mar del Golfo de México y las Lagunas de Sontecomapan y del Ostión, es una zona que se caracterizó por la multiculturalidad y la variedad de patrones debido a la presencia de un sistema portuario que estuvo activo desde el periodo Formativo medio hasta el Clásico tardío (1200 aC-1000 dC). Así mismo, la presencia de estos elementos naturales que lo delimitan fue y sigue siendo el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter. María Eugenia Maldonado Vite.

Pre-Columbian Huastec stone sculptures and clay figurines for the most part have been interpreted as deities and assumed to belong to the same religious cult. They also have typically been interpreted through a central Mexican lens and been identified as and associated with Late Postclassic central Mexican deities. Female figures in particular have been interpreted as Tlazolteotl, the central Mexican goddess of parturition, sexuality, and purification—a deity thought to be closely related to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Clifton.

This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A systematic survey of archaeological vessels in the collections of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe revealed almost 100 bird form jars, frequently referred to as duck pots or shoe jars, from New Mexico and its border environs. The survey found, among other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cecelia Klein.

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. All sixteen birds carved on the sides of the Platform of the Eagles and Jaguars at Chichen Itza have been traditionally identified as eagles. Because each pair of birds flanks a large relief of a seated jaguar holding a heart, it has been assumed in the past that the platform celebrated military orders like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catharina Santasilia.

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. The Early Formative site of Tlatilco, has like so many other ancient sites, been covered by modern-day urbanization. Many of these sites suffered a fate of early exploitation and looting leaving the archaeologists with puzzles that often lack many pieces. With resilience and patience, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo Pascual Soto.

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. Si bien el culto al soberano no podría expresar de mejor manera el carácter sagrado que se le confería de antiguo y el extraordinario poder que se concentraba en su persona, es en El Tajín cuando evoluciona sobre las bases de una ideología de reciente introducción hacia una liturgia ligada a una tradición cultural que en el Epiclásico...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Fernstrom.

Two- and three-dimensional human figures, and disembodied parts of figures, are commonly found across North America, and are considered important dimensions of Native American art. Figures appear in diverse media and sizes including stone, copper, shell, earthen effigy mounds, and petroglyphs/petrographs. In the literature, they are most frequently addressed as examples of art for the regions in which they are found, but rarely as pan-North American phenomena. A solely regional perspective...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Millones.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The critical role of emotions in any social framework is a problematic element to address from the archaeological record. The nuances of nonverbal communication preceded articulated language and the production of any other communication record in the human species. Behavioral studies, supported by neuroanatomical registration, allow the detailed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Michael Carrasco.

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 honor John Justeson’s contributions to the study of Mesoamerican writing and symbolic systems by revisiting the Epi-Olmec corpus of Classic period Cerro de las Mesas (300–900 CE). Four of the stelae from this site contain examples of the Epi-Olmec script, and their accompanying iconographic programs make...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Strauss.

Epi-Olmec is a nebulous term, adrift in both time and space. Weakly defined by a set of slippery contrasts - isolated from what came before and what comes after - the descriptor lacks robust categorization of its own. And yet in spite of this hollow terminology, the words "Epi-Olmec" themselves are so politically fraught that certain scholars have adopted the even more obfuscatory term "Isthmian", a label growing in popularity within the literature. This paper begins the process of defining...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonino Crisà.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The project "Token Communities in the Ancient Mediterranean", held at the University of Warwick, is currently examining token production on a wide scale, assessing new finds from European museums. Roman "tesserae" (tokens) may be defined as monetiform objects produced and used instead of money in specific civic contexts. As a Research Fellow in the on-going...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Ruf.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using Costa Rican precolumbian jade, jadeite, and greenstone artifacts from the collections of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, this study aims to amplify and widen the range of research carried out on the Isthmo-Colombian Area. It particularly seeks to examine and discuss the role of those objects as indicators of rank and prestige as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Ladron De Guevara.

The deities of El Tajin seem to share a characteristic scroll eyebrow in bas reliefs as well as in mural paintings. I will follow the representation of such an icon, trying to recognize posible origins, the outreach of the element and the symbolic associations in Mesoamerican time and space.