Women Who Create and Feed the Gods: Female Priestly Work in Mesoamerica and the Andean Area

Summary

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

This paper aims to study the role played by female characters presented in the Mexica and Inca religious hierarchy in a comparative perspective. In first case, we mention the cihuamocexiuhzauhque, the "women who fast for a year," (Mazzetto 2017, 2020) while in the second we refer to the acllacuna. The activities carried out by these ritual specialists attracted the attention of the Spaniards who compared them respectively with the Catholic nuns or with the Roman Vestals (Alberti Manzanares 1986, 1987). In this speech we will focus on their function of creating and feeding divine beings. In the first part of the work we will analyze the relationship of these women with specific foods consumed in ritual and festive sphere: the *tzoalli (amaranth and honey dough) and the *zancu (corn mixed with blood). In the second part we will demonstrate how these women played an essential role in some Mexica god’s life cycle and deified Inca mummies. Comparison between these two religious categories must be cautious, however, it will provide us with a significant methodology tool to understand how humans participated in the construction, commissioning, and prosperity of extra-human beings (Olivier 2015, 2020).

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): 33071