Iconographic Portraiture and Political Implications: Peter Harrison’s Contribution to Mayanists’ Understanding of Site Q

Summary

As a dirt archaeologist, Peter D. Harrison was both intrigued by and skeptical of hieroglyphic interpretations about the ancient Maya, especially relating to Tikal, Guatemala and its political context. However, at the same time he was particularly interested in site emblem glyphs and their significance, centering first on Tikal and next on Tikal’s political enemies. One of his published contributions to the field was a well-documented paper in which he critiqued the way in which epigraphers had lumped a number of different animal heads together as representative of a single polity. Harrison argued that a variety of animal representations were conflated within what was then called the Site Q emblem glyph and that what was being attributed to a single entity was actually the products of several polities. This paper revisits Peter’s earlier contribution and, through doing this, also examines the role of what has been referred to as Site Q within broader Maya political history.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Fields to the Palaces of the Prehistoric Maya: Hono(u)ring the Contributions of the late Peter D. Harrison   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage