Considerations Regarding the Sculptures Commonly Called "Standard-Bearers"

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Many images in the iconographic corpus from Pre-Hispanic Basin of Mexico belong to forms which were created and reproduced either in codices, mural painting, ceramics, and sculpture. Some examples are the attires of deities, specific icons used to represent natural elements, like rain, comets, even the Sun, and corporal postures used to communicate the identity of a character as well as the activities it performs. In the specific case of stone sculpture, the posture of "standard bearer" was commonly represented. In it, the character appears erect with its feet together, one or both arms flexed; the hands have one or two perforations, usually recognized as the hole to insert the bearer. Nevertheless, a detailed analysis shows that these sculptures were created to represent a broad range of characters, like deities or warriors, which will be the focus of the present paper. This kind of representations are also common in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley, and the Gulf Coast, and very rare in other macroregional areas like West Mexico, the Mixteca and the Maya area, revealing an interaction between these zones based on sharing ideological and iconographic elements, and conforming similar artistic styles during Late Postclassic.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25482