Defining the Red Background Style: The Production of Object and Identity in an Ancient Maya Court

Summary

While many collections today exhibit Red Background vessels for their vibrant colors, supernatural content, and elegant hieroglyphic texts, recent scholarship has embedded these works in the greater social culture of the Late Classic Period. As highly mobile art objects, the vases appeared alongside works with other distinct painting styles in feasts throughout the Guatemalan Lowlands, where the vases would display the prestigious affiliations of the owners. The diverse narrative content on these vessels reveals the importance of mytho-historic origin stories and supernatural identities to the prevailing order, while the unique hieroglyphic texts link the painted style to the royal court of Pa’ Chan.

What identities and connotations would the Red Background style communicate as a representative of this geographic or political region? Refocusing the question of agency through the final product reveals that these works acted as part of a larger campaign for the typical courtly trappings of master artisan production and public feasting with representatives of other polities. This paper expands upon themes of my Master’s Thesis to explore how the surface decoration of the Red Background style communicated prestige and the elite identity of a specific place to the larger landscape of competitive and collaborative Maya city-states.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage