Presenting Order: Painting as Mythic Past and Mathematical Future in the Murals of San Bartolo and Xultun, Guatemala

Summary

Though the murals of San Bartolo and Xultun are located only 8km apart in the lowland forests of Guatemala they are separated by more than 800 years of Maya history and reflect very different relationships between society and the cosmos as well as between the artworks and their intended audiences. Where one publicly recounts episodes of Maya mythology and the idealized roles of both gods and kings in the creation and maintenance of cosmic order, the other painted within a private household illustrates the king and members of the court as the background for the scholarly calculations of cosmic cylces themselves. This paper uses the excavation, conservation, and interpretation of these two remarkable examples of Maya mural painting as a point of departure for discussing the evolving role of maya muralists and the continued use and alteration of these paintings long after their initial renderings.

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

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas

Keywords

Spatial Coverage