Feathered Serpents at Uxmal: Creation, Cosmos, Cosmopolitanism, and Kingship

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

At Uxmal, Yucatán, monumental plumed snakes appear in the sculptural program of the Main Ballcourt and Nunnery Quadrangle. These feathered serpents express complex concepts connected to their pan-Mesoamerican role as a demiurge associated with dawning light, life force, and cosmic order emerging from pre-creation watery darkness and chaos. The feathered serpents correlate with other aspects of these structures’ plan and iconographic programs that refer to aspects of creation mythology. The appearance of fully-feathered serpents at Uxmal reflects growing political contacts and trade between northern Yucatán and greater Mesoamerica during the Epiclassic/Terminal Classic periods, when regional rulers such as Chan Chaak K’ak’nal Ajaw of Uxmal sought to bolster claims to divinely mandated authority by combining Classic Maya religious imagery with that of the feathered serpents as "Toltec" symbols that emerged at Teotihuacan and were reformulated at Epiclassic/Terminal Classic centers, as well at Tula, Hidalgo and Chichén Itzá. Uxmal’s plumed snakes and other creation-related and "Toltec" symbolism represent a specific expression of a broader Mesoamerican ideological template that grounded sociopolitical order and historical events in a divine matrix, linking polity formation and royal dynasties to the creative energy and political authority represented by the feathered serpent.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23978