Rollout / Not Rollout: Maya Plate Painting and the Kerr Archive

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While Justin Kerr might be best known for pioneering the rollout photographic technique specific to three-dimensional drinking cups and serving vessels, some of his still photographs of painted plates also proved pivotal to the understanding of Classic Maya religion and history. Plates contain artists' visions of creation narratives, courtly scenes, dancing deities, decapitated beings, animal shenanigans, and important textual records. This presentation reviews the corpus of plates in the Kerr archive and analyzes both the graphic strategies of plate painters and the iconographic content on these relatively flat earthenware canvases. Specific case studies of individual masterpieces and potential schools of plate painting reveal the undeniable value of the record that Justin and Barbara Kerr have created, especially with a new generation of the archive at Dumbarton Oaks, in continuing to push forward the fields of Maya archaeology, epigraphy, and art history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38412.0