[Aztlan] May Pre-Columbian Society at the University of Pennsylvania Museum Meeting

[michael ruggeri]

Pre-Columbian Society at the University of Pennsylvania Museum Meeting
Saturday, May 9, 2009    1:30 PM
Lucia Henderson PhD Candidate, Department of Art and Art History,  
University of Texas at Austin
The Art of Performance: Song, Sound, and Breath in the Iconography of  
Preclassic Kaminaljuyú

University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,  
Room 345
3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

The talk examines a group of monument fragments from the Late  
Preclassic Maya site of Kaminaljuyú, Guatemala, many of which have  
never been published or seen by the public before. They are all  
fragments of silhouette sculptures, thin, one-sided, bas-relief cut  
outs, a strange format almost unique to Kaminaljuyú. They show figures  
singing, speaking, or playing musical instruments: the earliest  
incontestable images of musical performance known from the Maya area.  
As such, these fragments appear to have much to say not only about the  
role of performance, song, music, and speech at Kaminaljuyú, but about  
the manner in which kings and the office of rulership were structured  
during this early period in the history of Mayan civilization.
Music, song, and speech are well attested throughout Mesoamerica as  
ways of communicating with and summoning the gods. Such sacred sounds  
were also closely tied to concepts of the breath soul, which was  
believed to animate humans, gods, and even material objects. As  
evidenced by these silhouette fragments, the Preclassic inhabitants of  
Kaminaljuyú believed that acts of music, song, and speech were worthy  
of being sculpted in stone and populated their site with musicians and  
performers that continued to play, sing, and speak in perpetuity.
At least two of the sculptures specifically identify rulers with  
sacred sound. One image even appears to show the ruler as the  
embodiment of wind, the breath soul, and speech or song. These  
sculptures, therefore, not only emphasize the time depth of  
performance in the Maya area, but demonstrate that the power of kings  
was rooted in performance in a very visible way. In other words, these  
sculptures indicate that performance played an active and essential  
role in the execution of ritual and the maintenance of kingly power  
during the Preclassic period. As not only the performer of songs and  
speech, but the embodiment of these things, the Preclassic Kaminaljuyú  
king marked himself as a human manifestation of sacred sound, watery  
wind, and the most vital and important of breath souls.

Lucia Henderson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and  
Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation  
work centers on the beginnings of Maya art and iconography, with  
particular focus on the bas-relief sculptures at the Preclassic site  
of Kaminaljuyú, Guatemala. Lucia is a recipient of the prestigious  
Donald D. Harrington Fellowship and, in addition to her dissertation  
research, is slated to begin an underwater archaeology project in  
northwestern Peten, Guatemala, this summer.
Lucia graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a B.A. in  
archaeology in 2001. Her undergraduate work centered on her excavation  
of the tomb of Ruler 12 at the site of Copán,Honduras. She was trained  
in archaeological illustration by David Stuart and Ian Graham while  
working for the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions in Cambridge,  
Massachusetts, co-authoring The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic  
Inscriptions Vol. 9, Part 2: Toniná. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and  
Ethnology, 2006. She received her Masters Degree in Art History from  
the University of California,San Diego in 2005, where she broadened  
her research to include Aztec art and iconography. Her publications  
and research cover a broad territory, from the 13th Century American  
Southwest to the Preclassic Maya world. They include Producer of the  
Living, Eater of the Dead: Revealing Tlaltecuhtli, the Two-Faced Aztec  
Earth, B.A.R. 2006, Symbols in Clay: Seeking Artists' Identities in  
Hopi Yellow Ware Bowls, Co-authored with Dr. Steven LeBlanc, Peabody  
Museum Press, 2009, Blood, Vomit, Water, and Wine: Pulque in Maya and  
Aztec Belief, Mesoamerican Voices, in press), and A Common Space: Lake  
Amatitlan and Volcan Pacaya in the Cosmology of Highland Guatemala and  
Escuintla, University Press of Colorado, projected release 2010.

Mike Ruggeri's Ancient America Museum Exhibitions, Conferences and  
Lectures
http://tinyurl.com/c9mlao