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Political Themes on Mesoamerican Monuments: A Case Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Charles D. Cheek
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Abstract

Many Mesoamericanists today accept the fact that much Mesoamerican art, in various media, depicts historical events and persons. Much of this evidence has come from hieroglyphic texts. This paper attempts to demonstrate the value of using non-glyphic attributes of depictions of personages and of interaction scenes to investigate the same problems. Non-glyphic attributes of scenes and individual dress and ornamentation are treated as coded cultural information that reflects patterned sociocultural phenomena. This approach is applied to Cotzumalhuapan sculpture from Coastal Guatemala. It is demonstrated that there are two distinctive facial types in interaction which seem to represent two different socio-political groups.

Type
Reports
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , July 1975 , pp. 320 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1975

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