Crafting Human/Hieroglyph Relationships in Classic Maya Contexts

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The study of Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing (ca. AD 250-900, Mexico and Central America) has yielded rich understandings of texts in recent years through increasingly nuanced ways of reading, contextualizing, and interpreting hieroglyphs. Beyond examining hieroglyphic texts as culturally contextualized documentary sources, however, they also must be understood as "made" materials, crafted and created, and subsequently related to. This sense of texts as crafted requires not only connecting to their materiality and their involvement with the objects on which they appeared, but also understanding processes of writing (and reading) as culturally-moored productive acts (that is, ways of making), with attached beliefs and practices. In visual representations on painted ceramic vessels, we see examples of hieroglyphs leaving the boundaries of "text" and crossing over to enter human territory, indicating that we need to understand hieroglyphs as materialized and real in a human world. This paper looks closely at how Maya texts were understood to inhabit human spaces and how humans (textual writers and readers) saw themselves as related to or positioned in social relationships with writing. These discussions impact our modern methodological stance by shifting understandings of key ideas related to written evidence such as authorship, production, literacy, and textual control.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23008