Of Snakes and Masks: A Contextual and Iconographic Study of Ancient Maya Greenstone Mosaic Masks

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We argue that ancient Maya portable mosaic masks, found in high-elite burials across the Maya Lowlands, could have, at some point during the Late Classic period (AD 550–800) and perhaps even earlier, been the ideal insignias of the Kaanul “snake” regime, which in ancient Maya writing is represented by the head of a snake. Following close-up observations of images of snakes, in particular theirs faces and heads, we noted that their scales present similar features to the tesserae that form the greenstone mosaic masks; for example the Parrot Snake (*Leptophis mexicanus), which also has green scales that emulates the greenstone tesserae. Similarly, we believe that the buried pavements that constitute massive mosaic masks at the Olmec site of La Venta could have also been lifelike representations of a snake’s face and head where each individual carved block was used to re-create the scales of this reptile. Therefore, we propose that the main idea behind the prehspanic mosaic technique could have been inspired from the natural world, notably from the scales and scuta of snakes, crocodiles, and turtles.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33006