Emplacing a Classic Maya Ritual: Locating Deity Impersonation through Space and Time

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Michael Coe’s “The Maya Scribe and His World” (1973) and the 1971 Grolier Club exhibition for which it was produced marked the first sustained treatment of scribes and artists in scholarship on Classic Maya civilization. It also highlighted the wealth of information that ceramics and other portable objects offer about Classic Maya religion. Yet one of the many difficulties of the publication and exhibition’s emphasis on looted artifacts was the inability to locate any of them—and, by extension, the insights that they provided—in time or space. This presentation examines how centering provenanced sources can alter our understanding of Classic Maya religion, taking as its case study one of the many hieroglyphic phrases that Coe observed on the exhibition’s painted ceramics and that was later deciphered as a reference to deity impersonation. By focusing on archaeologically documented attestations of this practice in Classic Maya text and image, we can appreciate the development of a ritual across time and space and the dynamism of a religious tradition that, despite its many continuities, was constantly changing during its history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36043.0