The Multiple Meanings of the Rock Art Landscape of Central and Southern Honduras

Summary

The physical landscape of Honduras was and continues to be home to a diverse group of indigenous groups, each with distinct cultural traditions, artistic styles, and sociopolitical configurations. In prehistory, this landscape was imbued with cultural meaning in a variety of ways, from the monumental to the perishable. This paper presents and discusses what we know about the rock art of central and southern Honduras, which contains a variety of iconographic rock art styles within a very limited spatial scale. The location and content of these sites suggest the inhabitants of this part of Honduras assigned multiple, often overlapping meanings to major features of the landscape, particularly caves and waterways. While preliminary, the results of the work done so far in this region indicate strong symbolic connections with Mesoamerican groups to the north and Lower Central American groups to the south.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22127