Water, Creation, and Celestial Phenomena at La Casa de las Golondrinas, Guatemala

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

La Casa de las Golondrinas is a Mesoamerican sacred rock art and pilgrimage site located in the southern end of the Antigua Valley in the central highlands of Guatemala near water sources and routes of travel. Recently, mapping efforts have found that the natural site, 500 m long, was culturally structured with hundreds of images and many Precolumbian structures. This paper will focus on motifs and features recorded by the Proyecto Arqueológico del Área Kaqchikel (PAAK) that are concerned with water and by extension rain-making, and the interwoven life forces of creation, fertility, reproduction, and cycles of time. The images also include references to sky-related phenomena including the sun, the moon, Late Postclassic deities, and constellations. This paper will discuss these images with reference to the Mesoamerican ethnographic literature and the social and physical contexts of the images.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39345.0