Measures of Intertextuality in the Language of Ritual in Late Preclassic Mayan Texts

Summary

Language serves to enact and commemorate ritual behavior. And ritual behavior, while embedded in tradition, is adaptive, and can serve to mediate and implement social and cultural change. This paper examines epigraphic evidence of relevance to ritual practices and their contextualization and recontextualization, with the goal of tracing the correlation between linguistic practices, on the one hand, and social and cultural change, on the other. The goal is to document and account for intertextuality gaps in data spanning from ca. 400 BCE-CE 900. Several variables are considered: orthographic conventions, calendrical content, ritual expressions, grammatical constructions, stylistic devices, and the scale and medium of writing. The study, based on a database of over 800 texts, then traces the correlations of these variables across time. Some of the results point to an early emphasis on written language as part of the ritual act itself, rather than a commemorative act, as well as a correlation between the diversification of inscribed media and hieroglyphic genres, and between certain grammatical constructions and an emphasis on the ritual practitioner (e.g. antipassives) or the ritual implement (e.g. passives, mediopassives, inchoatives), which themselves point to shifting recontextualizations of ritual practice.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The dimensions of Rituality 2000 years ago and today   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage