From Rags to Riches: The Class, Status, and Power of Clothing Among Ancient Maya Women

Summary

Analysis of Maya female imagery has generally centered on the role of women as depicted on monumental architecture. While we understand these depictions to be tools of propaganda, they are often used to make assertions about the lived experience of ancient Maya women. In contrast to the analysis of highly politicized and highly public imagery depicted on monumental architecture, this paper examines depictions of feminine performance on a personalized medium: Maya painted vases. More specifically, this paper will focus on the juxtaposition of clothing design and performativity, including gesture, pose and activity, among Maya women.

An examination of vessel imagery through the comparative lens of performance and clothing challenges the idea of Maya social organization as a dichotomized system in which individuals are classed as either elite or commoners, but not both, never somewhere in-between. Although primarily an analysis of vessel imagery, these inferences can be extended to other forms of representation including ceramic figurines and mural paintings to form a more complete, and more complicated, picture of ancient Maya social relations. When clothing design and performative action are analyzed in tandem, the elite/commoner dichotomy collapses, revealing the highly meaningful intersection of ancient Maya social, political, and economic identity.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage