Art Objects Don’t Make Themselves! A Consideration of the Ik’ Style from the Petén Lakes Region
Author(s): Megan Leight
Year: 2016
Summary
Art-making is an essential element of Mesoamerican culture. Asserting the primacy of the art object as a site of inquiry can provide a fascinating framework for organizing, imagining, and interpreting the past. This paper considers art objects produced during the Late Classic (ca. 600-900 CE) by the Maya Ik’ polity in Petén, Guatemala. The elaborately painted surfaces with naturalistic figures, realistic color schemes, and detailed hieroglyphic inscriptions about artists, patrons, and regional history abound on ceramic vessels. These works function not only as prestige items, but also as textual sources produced by Ik’ polity elites. This paper uses recent archaeological discoveries from the Petén Lakes region and contemporary methodologies to consider Ik’ polity artistic practices and ideology.
Cite this Record
Art Objects Don’t Make Themselves! A Consideration of the Ik’ Style from the Petén Lakes Region. Megan Leight. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, Florida. 2016 ( tDAR id: 404149)
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Keywords
General
Art
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Iconography
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Maya
Geographic Keywords
Mesoamerica
Spatial Coverage
min long: -107.271; min lat: 12.383 ; max long: -86.353; max lat: 23.08 ;