The Peal of Domination at San Bernabé, Petén, Guatemala

Summary

This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1718, Bishop Juan Gómez de Pareda, the 20th bishop of Yucatan, consecrated a number of bells destined for churches in what is now Petén, Guatemala. At least two of these bells swung in the San Bernabé mission church. The mission was established on the western end of the Tayasal peninsula in Petén, Guatemala a little over a decade after the conquest of Nojpeten, the Itza capital in 1697. Bells herald important rites, daily cycles, and other events but they were also instruments of policia cristiana—of Christian practice. Of course, they were not the only instruments of conversion in colonial period churches. Churches were literal road maps toward salvation and heavenly Jerusalem. However, bells were certainly the loudest and the most penetrating. The current paper considers how bells and other symbols acted as objects of disciple in the context of colonial Petén.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24385