Art and Design Department

Río Amarillo is a rural center located northeast of Copán along the Copán River Valley that offers fascinating evidence of interactions between the urban and rural populations during the Classic period phase of human settlement. Although Copán’s Principal Group and immediate surrounding environs have been extensively studied, the Copán Valley’s secondary centers such as Río Amarillo have received relatively less attention in the archaeological research of the region. Previous research at the site has focused on the tenuous relationship amongst the elites residing at Río Amarillo in relation to Copán, particularly focusing on urban settlement patterns and architectural formations. My project proposes an examination of the sculptures in relation to those at the Copán polity. By investigating the relationship of these two sites, I hope to distinguish iconographic patterns that reflect this association. While Río Amarillo and Copán were roughly coeval, the impact of their similar artistic patterning has yet to be examined in enough detail. What do the later final elements of the building campaigns at Río Amarillo that so distinctly recall the Copán aesthetic, truly reflect about the individuals and rulers living at Río Amarillo and their relationship with Copán?

Teotihuacan, Mexico’s major cosmopolitan city until its demise in the mid-6th century, was a place of origins, laws, and power. It became a source of inspiration as a tollan, with its highly recognizable artistic styles echoing across ancient Mesoamerica. Google-eyed masks and warrior-style headdresses embellish the individuals of many Early Classic Maya monuments, but Teotihuacano art is largely deemed impersonal. The human figures represented are not believed to represent actual individuals rather deities, unlike their Maya counterparts who utilize ancestors and rulers in Teotihuacan garb. This paper considers recent studies on the identity of human figures in Teotihuacan imagery, which tend to vacillate on whether or not actual individuals are represented.

Teotihuacan was a major cosmopolitan city located in the Basin of Mexico during the Classic Period (100-700 CE). The artwork has long fascinated but bewildered scholars, and despite the emulation of Teotihuacan’s recognizable artistic styles across Mesoamerica, we still understand relatively little about their artistic styles today. This paper aims to examine the conch shell motif from artwork at Teotihuacan, particularly visible in extant mural paintings. It will focus on investigating the appearance of conch shells, conchs used as trumpet devices, and cache burials of carved conchs. Many scholars have proposed the conch is most related to noise, the wind, and the underworld. In particular, scholars link Teotihuacan’s Quetzalcoatl using a conch shell as a sounding device to best Mictlantecuhtli in the underworld and the American Southwest’s Zuni culture’s feathered serpent named Kolowiki, which was summoned by the conch shell trumpet. In these cases, there are strong ties to the underworld and emergence myths. In order to better understand these historically proposed relationships, this study will explore the conch shell as an isolated theme in Teotihuacan art.

Art-making is an essential element of Mesoamerican culture. Asserting the primacy of the art object as a site of inquiry can provide a fascinating framework for organizing, imagining, and interpreting the past. This paper considers art objects produced during the Late Classic (ca. 600–900 C.E.) by the Maya Ik' polity in Petén, Guatemala. The elaborately painted surfaces with naturalistic figures, realistic color schemes, and detailed hieroglyphic inscriptions about artists, patrons, and regional history abound on ceramic vessels. These works function not only as prestige items, but also as textual sources produced by Ik' polity elites. This paper uses recent archaeological discoveries from the Petén Lakes region and contemporary methodologies to consider Ik' polity artistic practices and ideology.

Co-authors: M. Leight and C. Halerpin
One of the striking features of contemporary Maya textiles is that their production techniques and aesthetics can be highly regionalized. These textiles manifest strong village, town, and community identities while simultaneously reproducing other identity formations (e.g., gender, ethnicity). Likewise, Classic period Maya (ca. 300-900 CE) political formations were highly regionalized with multiple, shifting centers of gravity. Nonetheless, relatively little is known about the variability of Classic period textiles across the Maya Lowlands and whether textiles were caught up in the political fissions and regionalisms identified in hieroglyphic texts. This paper explores several Classic period Maya textile and garment traditions that have been previously overlooked in the literature. We suggest that unlike other crafting communities, those surrounding textiles often defied the boundaries of petty politics.

Co-authors: M. Leight, B. Woodfill, and A. Rivas
Investigations at Cancuen, Sebol, Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, and other sites at the base of the Guatemalan highlands since the late 1990s have shown the importance of the region for importing and refining a variety of highland goods for the lowland market. While most of the emphasis has been placed on the goods for which there is direct evidence of production and exchange—obsidian, jade, iron pyrite, and other lithic commodities present in abundance at these and other sites—Demarest, Dillon, and other scholars have posited that these sites were also important nodes of exchange for perishable goods that are harder to find in the archaeological record. This presentation will focus on two of these perishable commodities—salt and quetzal feathers, both of which have ample ethnohistoric descriptions of their production during and after the Spanish conquest, and both of which are common in Classic Maya lowland iconography. The authors will discuss production techniques, their importance in the lowland economy, and Precolumbian evidence for their production and exchange.

Co-authors: Brent K.S. Woodfill, Judith Valle, Edgar Carpio, Socorro Jiménez del Pilar, Megan Leight, Katerín Molina, William Odom, Alex Rivas, and Carlos Efraín Tox Tiul.
En esta ponencia se presentan algunos de los hallazgos del Proyecto Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, durante Temporada de Campo y Laboratorio 2017. Se continuó con la investigación de un posible puerto en el río Chixoy y se excavó en la Aldea Tierra Blanca Chixoy, en donde se recuperó un depósito de cerámica especial que evidenció la actividad que se llevó a cabo por los habitantes del grupo. También se realizó una investigación en los municipios fronterizos de Benemérito de las Américas y Marqués de Comilla, Chiapas, México, con el objetivo de establecer conexiones entre esta región y Salinas de los Nueve Cerros. También se desarrolló una propuesta sobre el manejo del agua en la ciudad prehispánica. Además se efectuó un análisis de 123 muestras de obsidiana con tecnología XRF, con el propósito de establecer procedencia y el cual servirá de base para una identificación visual del resto de los objetos, se incluyen también algunos avances en el componente de desarrollo comunitario.

In this paper, the authors present some of the recent discoveries and advances of the Salinas de los Nueve Cerros Archaeological Project during the 2017 field and laboratory seasons. Members continued
an investigation of a probable port on the Chixoy River and excavated a small architectural group in the village of Tierra Blanca Chixoy. The latter included a special ceramic deposit with evidence of interregional trade into the highlands. A second team also conducted research across the border in Chiapas in the municipalities of Benemérito de las Américas and Marqués de Comilla with the goal of finding secondary settlements to the north. Finally, the lithics team sourced the large obsidian sample at the site with the assistance of an XRF device. This paper also includes advances in the community development work.

Co-authors: B. Woodfill, J. Valle, E. Carpio, S. Jiménez de Pilar, M. Leight, W. Odum, and A. Rivas.

Presented at the XXXI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, Instituto Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, Guatemala City, Guatemala, held July 17-21, 2017.

Co-authors: A. Rivas, M. Leight, B. Woodfill, C. Tox Tiul, and J. Valle
Presented at the XXX Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, Instituto Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, Guatemala City, Guatemala held, July 18-22, 2016.