The Chocholá Style: Expanding the Corpus Part 2

Summary

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

Chocholá style ceramics were part of a Late Classic northern Maya complex of luxury goods that identified the social status and political affiliation of their owners. Vessels in the style are distinguished by their deeply carved iconographic panels, distinctive formatting, and unique dedicatory formulae. Their recognizability—a necessary component of the sociopolitical messaging in which these vessels played a role—is due in large part to these characteristic features. The conventions that guided the formation of this set demonstrate flexibility, however; Chocholá potters experimented with many variations to the core style even as more distantly related outliers were also developed. It has been roughly twelve years since the most recent presentation of a Chocholá corpus and in that time new examples have come to light through publication and presentation in museum display. In a previous paper, I showed that this iconographic expansion of the corpus demonstrates further variety in image selection even as standard formatting approaches remain relatively constant. In this paper, I will review the new hieroglyphic inclusions found within the expanded corpus. These texts, like the image-based additions considered previously, increase awareness of the variability inherent in the style even as they solidify core attributes.

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): 53897