The Role of the Sweatbath in Classic Maya Ritual Performance
Author(s): Mary Clarke
Year: 2015
Summary
This paper reviews the scholarship regarding Mesoamerican sweatbaths and their role in performance, specifically choreographing locations for transformation and sympathetic transition in supernatural space. The recently discovered sweatbath at the site of Xultun in Guatemala, known as Los Sapos, will be inserted into this dialogue in conjunction with that regarding plazas and Maya theatricality more broadly. After both contextualizing Los Sapos and presenting interpretations regarding its site-specific function, this paper will propose conclusions that will add to the knowledge of these unique structures within the known corpus of Mesoamerican architecture.
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.
Cite this Record
The Role of the Sweatbath in Classic Maya Ritual Performance. Mary Clarke. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396879)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
Iconography
•
Ritual performance
•
Sweatbath
Geographic Keywords
Mesoamerica
Spatial Coverage
min long: -107.271; min lat: 12.383 ; max long: -86.353; max lat: 23.08 ;