Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Clay figurines are very common artifacts in Mesoamerica, present in all cultures from Preclassic to Postclassic times. Depicting miniature anthropomorphic and zoomorphic beings, they have been studied in multiple ways, as they reveal the ways of life of ancient cultures. As images, they support iconographic studies and considerations on socio-political and ritual organization. As portable objects, they refer to their own specific uses and functions. As pottery productions, to techniques and craft organization. However, and despite the fact that many studies still rely on artifacts that do not come from controlled excavations, knowing the context of their last deposit is an essential key to understand their meanings and uses. This symposium has the goal of gathering papers that will allow to compare archaeological contexts in which figurines were found, to try to isolate constants or, on the contrary, regional and temporal particularities.