Yucatecan and Mesoamerican Influences on Taino Ceremonial Iconography

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The iconographic corpus of the Taino cultures has been the focus of recent scholarship, yet as a whole remains understudied within Caribbean archaeology. Scholars in the past attempted to demonstrably link the Taino to the Late Postclassic Maya with limited success. However, Yucatecan influences are evident within the spatial layout of Taino ceremonial architecture of batey ballcourts, as well as from the presence of certain objects observed on Taino archaeological sites, such as stone yokes and jadeite celts. Through examinations of the Maya "muyal" glyph and similar motifs expressed in post-Saladoid Taino media, such as Cohoba snuffing tools, elite regalia, rock art, and zemis, this research suggests there exists a correlative meaning imbued within these symbols that allowed the religious actors who ritually utilized them to sequester preternatural powers to access ancestral realms. It is without question that the particular meaning inscribed in Taino motifs represents components of a unique and distinctive religious system that developed within the Greater Antilles. However, these symbols may have carried a prescribed meaning derivative from Late Postclassic, and by extension earlier Maya and Olmec cosmological ideology, which diffused through a bilateral regional interaction sphere based on long-distance maritime trade.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39352.0