Women’s Hands in the Rock Art of Mensabak Lake, Chiapas, Mexico: An Approach from the Agency Theory

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Representations of hands in rock art is a polysemy motif registered among different archaeological sites in Chiapas, Mexico. Painted hands are a recurrent representation in the cliffs of Mensabak Lake in the Lacandon Rainforest, where these paintings were made by both positive and negative techniques. This paper will discuss the semantics of hand representation in rock art and will compare the results of the study with present-day Maya Lacandon. The team used a participative methodology to measure hands of men and women from different ages to identify the sex and age range of the people who made prints on the cliffs. Those results indicated that 22% of the hand prints in the rock art in Mensabak Lake were made by young women. The action and participation range of young Maya women used in rituals in the sacred cliffs has been made using the human agency theory. Parallel to this research, we will use the ethnographic data gathered to contrast Maya Lacandon women’s role in current rituals performed in the shrines in the surroundings of this sacred lake.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 30910