The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

One of the most important breakthroughs in the study of indigenous religions in the Americas over the past two decades is the identification of the Flower World, a solar and floral spiritual domain that is widely shared in diverse manifestations among prehispanic and contemporary native cultures in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. The Flower World is not simply an ethereal otherworldly domain, but it is a lived experience activated, invoked, and materialized through ritual practices, expressed in verbal and visual metaphors, and embedded in the production and use of material objects. Scholarship by archaeologists, art historians, ethnologists, linguists, and material analysts have emphasized both the antiquity and geographical extent of similar beliefs among a multitude of ethnic and linguistic groups in the New World. While widespread and diverse in representation, this complex was not present among all cultures at all times in these regions. This symposium is the first to bring together scholars whose work directly engages the representation of Flower World in material culture, beliefs, and practices, and its various historical and contemporary manifestations so as to better understand its origin and nature, its dissemination and transformation, and its role in shaping ritual economies, political ideologies, and cross-cultural interactions.