The Future and War at Play: Contextual Analyses of a Royal Funerary Polychrome Platter from Ancient Waka’

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Among the numerous funerary offerings associated with the interment of Lady K'abel, the Kaanul queen who ruled at the mid-sized Classic Maya city of Waka’, was a particularly large polychrome platter. Keith Eppich identified the platter as a Late Classic Palmar Orange polychrome and it features an array of motifs, including cormorants and circular objects adorning the vessel’s outer and inner borders. The platter features a large, punctured hole in the center, likely representing a “kill” hole and it was placed face down over the left arm of the interred. We employ contextual and iconographic analyses to argue this platter was used as a gaming and a divinatory board/tablet. Its positioning in the tomb also mimicked its representation as a shield, which is directly comparable to other representations of this ruler (Navarro-Farr et al. 2020). In this analysis, we employ Indigenous ontological frameworks to interrogate the relationships between game boards, divination, and warfare from a Classic Maya perspective. We also consider how this object, as a possession of the interred, underscores the authority of the royal woman who wielded it.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53121