Verdant Signs: The Making and Shaping of Foodstuffs in Mesoamerican Texts

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Verdant signs abound in the writing systems of ancient Mesoamerica. Hieroglyphic records of abundance, germination, and rebirth ground ritual speech in agricultural metaphors. A robust iconography of vegetal growth reflects both the natural environment and human ingenuity through plant domestication and resource exploitation. This paper offers a cross-cultural exploration of vegetal expressions from the epigraphic record and provides a step forward in assembling a visual vocabulary of growth and consumption glyphs. From Epi-Olmec, to Maya, to Mixtec, this study of verdant signs stretches across Mesoamerican time and space to push our understanding of this topic beyond the iconic subjects of maize and cacao.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37743.0