Chajul and the Ixil Region during Prehispanic Times

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological, epigraphic, and ethnohistoric data indicate that Chajul was an important precolumbian center of the Ixil Maya. In this paper we present an overview of archaeological investigations conducted in the Ixil region sites. Moreover, we present the results of archaeological excavations conducted at Chajul in the 2021 season. This research is associated with the houses from which mural paintings were restored by the COMUCH (Conservation of the Chajul Murals Project) before and during the 2021 season. The major purpose of these archaeological works was to obtain information about the dating of the murals and to test the hypothesis concerning which houses with murals might have been constructed over the vestiges of precolumbian architecture. In total, four test-pits were excavated, from which archaeological material of different periods was obtained—from prehispanic, through colonial, to modern times. This paper presents the results of these archaeological works, as well as the subsequent analysis of the materials recovered during the excavations. Finally, we provide preliminary results of epigraphic analysis of hieroglyphic texts from several vessels that come from the Ixil region but now in public or private collections.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36495.0