Classic Maya Wahys: What, Who, Where, and Why?

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.

The Kerr cataloging project at Dumbarton Oaks is creating opportunities to re-examine iconographic motifs and hieroglyphic texts on Maya pottery. One avenue in which this has been fruitful is the analysis of vessels depicting wahy creatures. In modern communities, ways are powerful individuals with the ability to change shape at night, often for the purpose of causing harm or mischief. Classic Maya wahys were similarly linked to sorcery and have highly specific names and iconographic attributes aligning them with diseases and other misfortunes. In 1994, Grube and Nahm published their “census” of 55 such entities in Kerr’s Maya Vase Book. Today, after examining 186 scenes of cavorting wahy creatures, I have edited and expanded that list to 89. Glyphic captions frequently associate these entities with specific place names, allowing me to analyze how they were distributed in space, and what they might mean politically.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38083.0