Architectural Caves and Glyphic Stepped Platforms

Author(s): Mario Giron-Ábrego

Year: 2015

Summary

Natural and man-made caves are clearly attested to in myth, iconography and the glyphic corpus as powerful features for the ancient and contemporary Maya. Caves are paramount for they function as entrances into the sacred earth, the most powerful entity of the sacred Maya universe. A third and less explicit category of these subterranean features, although extensively documented (Brady 2011; Rivera Dorado 1993; Tate 1992) in the Maya area, are architectural caves. This latter category, due to their architectural nature, may elucidate in understanding the meaning of the still undeciphered T685 "pyramid" or "stepped-platform" glyph as an architectural CH’EEN "cave" based on the glyphic affixation of this logogram.

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Cite this Record

Architectural Caves and Glyphic Stepped Platforms. Mario Giron-Ábrego. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 395438)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: -107.271; min lat: 12.383 ; max long: -86.353; max lat: 23.08 ;