Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 1

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 1" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ancient cultures along the Gulf Coast of Mexico produced some of the most significant sculptural traditions of Mesoamerica. The types of sculptures range from colossal heads, figurative statues, carved and plain stelae, large-scale terracotta sculptures, relief-carved ball-court panels, to yokes, hachas, and palmas decorated with intricate entrelaces. Although some traditions have received a lot of scholarly attention, others have not—and few studies have attempted to understand the relationships of these diverse sculptural traditions over time and space. The cultural-historical approach to the region has led to its conceptual segmentation as well as of its artistic developments, resulting in an oversimplified cultural and by extension sculptural sequence that proceeds from south to north: the Preclassic Olmec in the south, Classic Veracruz along the central Gulf Coast, and the Postclassic Huastec culture in the north. In this session, archaeologists and art historians working in the Mexican Gulf lowlands will examine sculpture relative to issues such as interregional and intraregional connections, continuity and disjunction, cross-media relationships, and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Participants will consider social memory, reuse, and ritual destruction, as well as the visual references in cultural dispersal, with an eye toward creating a new synthesis of ancient Gulf Coast sculpture.