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FEBRUARY 2010 LECTURES AND WORKSHOPS |
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FEBRUARY 2010 LECTURES AND WORKSHOPS |
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FRIDAY, February 5:
SATURDAY, February 6:
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The
Mirador Group is one of El Perú-Waka’s principal architectural
groups, comprised of a small temple and two of the site’s grandest
pyramids. Excavations conducted from 2003-2006 demonstrate a lengthy
tradition of ritual activity associated with these buildings,
extending from the Late Preclassic through the Terminal Classic
period. Moreover, one of the pyramids served a long-term mortuary
function for high-status elites, housing the remains of an unknown
ruler and three elite women. Archaeological discoveries at the
Mirador Group will be highlighted in this presentation, and also
examined relative to specific historical events documented in the
Mayan epigraphic record. This comparative approach allows us to
explore how El Perú may have been integrated into the larger
Mesoamerican world system – namely with the central Mexican
metropolis of Teotihuacan and the dominant Maya capitals of Tikal
and Calakmul.
The
excavation of ancient tombs has always captured the imagination of
intrepid explorers, professional archaeologists and an interested
public alike. In the Maya area, two factors have dovetailed to
create an ongoing focus on burial contexts in archaeological
fieldwork. First, Classic-period Maya interments are common in both
ritual and residential structures, making it virtually impossible to
excavate a building without encountering a burial; and second, the
Maya have a rich artistic tradition, and as a result, many
burials – particularly of the ancient elite – contain elaborate
funerary objects. A tomb, however, is a complex interweaving of
multiple categories of information: from the typically-showcased
artifacts, to human and animal skeletal material, to fine-grained
data such as pigments and minerals that tend to be understudied or
overlooked relative to other tomb contents. Consequently, multiple
scales of mortuary data are vital when coming to conclusions about
burial practices among the ancient Maya. In this informal seminar we
will focus on several royal and noble tombs from El Perú-Waka’
to explore what the full range of components of a mortuary
assemblage can tell us about the interred individual(s), as well as
the people who conducted associated burial rituals, and how ancient
re-entry activities may affect archaeological interpretations.