The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The work of Justin and Barbara Kerr has significantly advanced our understanding of ancient Maya ceramics. With his development of a special roll-out camera, Justin Kerr was able to create single photographs of the scenes decorating the surface of cylindrical vases. Using this technique, the Kerrs built a substantial image corpus of vessels from public and private collections and made these widely available to the scholarly community—first in print, with the “Maya Vase Book,” and later with the creation of the searchable online database Mayavase.com. In 2013, the Kerrs donated their photographic collection of over 60,000 images of Mesoamerican ceramics and artifacts to Dumbarton Oaks. As stewards of this material, we are working to provide new high-resolution scans and catalogue them according to the latest iconographic and epigraphic standards. Using images from the Kerr corpus as well as other comparative material, the papers in this session will examine how ceramic styles, iconographic themes, and hieroglyphic texts interrelate and what this may tell us about Classic period political, economic, or cultural developments. We hope that the Kerr Archive can continue to be a catalyst for cutting-edge research on text and image in Maya ceramic art.