Matthew G. Looper

NAHUA IN ANCIENT MESOAMERICA: Evidence from Maya inscriptions

This paper examines Nahua words found in both the Maya codices and the monumental texts. These words, spelled with syllabic signs, occur for the most part in contexts associated with foreign influence: Nahuatl deity names and words for “helmet,” “tribute,” and “heart.” One word—“and then”—is a conjunction used frequently in discourse. Sound correspondences between these loan words and the Nahua sources suggest an Eastern Nahua dialect as the likely source during the Classic period. Thus, Mexican influence in the Maya area, frequently attributed directly to Teotihuacan, may in fact have come by way of Nahua-speakers settled in the Gulf region. The epigraphic evidence establishes that Nahua speakers were influential in Mesoamerica far earlier than previously believed.

From Inscribed Bodies to Distributed Persons: Contextualizing Tairona Figural Images in Performance

Following trends in anthropology, the human body has recently become an important topic of discourse in archaeology. While some anthropologists consider the body as a social metaphor or site of symbolic inscription, others have questioned the validity of approaches based on the dichotomization and hierarchization of the mind and body. Semasiology, in particular, offers an epistemologically sound basis for interpreting the body, by grounding agency in the socially-structured actions that constitute corporeal space. This article applies the semasiological concept of the action-sign to archaeological problems through an examination of the interrelationship between Tairona anthropomorphic imagery and remains of ceremonial architecture at Pueblito, an archaeological site in Colombia. In both cases, physical remains constitute the traces of the actions through which agential persons created sacred spaces, and the meanings of these spaces may be more fully reconstructed by comparing diverse modes of embodiment. Tairona figural art and architecture constitute a creative technology, serving as an indexically-bound nexus of embodied social action.

RITUAL DIVERSITY AND DIVERGENCE OF CLASSIC MAYA DYNASTIC TRADITIONS: A LEXICAL PERSPECTIVE ON WITHIN-GROUP CULTURAL VARIATION

To study the Classic Maya is to at once recognize the shared material representations and practices that give coherence to this cultural category as a unit of analysis, as well as to critically examine the diversity and idiosyncrasy of specific cultural traits within prehispanic Maya society. Maya hieroglyphic writing, in particular the tradition of inscribing texts and images on carved stone monuments, offers evidence for widespread and mutually intelligible cultural practices that were, at the same time, neither unchanging nor uniform in their semantic content. As conduits of linguistic and cultural information, Maya hieroglyphic monuments offer detailed records of Classic Maya dynastic history that include the names, dates, and specific rituals performed by elite individuals. In this article, we analyze the distribution and diversity of these inscriptions

White Roads of the Yucatán: Changing Social Landscapes of the Yucatec Maya – By Justine M. Shaw

ready to put their lives on the line” (9). These “robust antebellum ideas about the afterlife may have helped Americans to stomach the carnage of war in the first place” (218). Schantz finds so many chilling examples of the palpable presence of death as a path to freedom in slave narratives, for example, that the continent seems awash in redemptive blood long before the war. Accustomed both to death and images of celestial healing, Americans were attuned to the next world even as they clung precariously to this one. Not surprisingly the rhetoric of death found its way into Lincoln’s speeches as if the script for the conflict had been foreordained. Though Schantz really has no need to push the thesis too far in this excellent book, he nevertheless assumes too much about the mental landscape of halfliterate farm boys who fell at Shiloh and Gettysburg, or those who mourned them. They may well have heard sermons and poems about the heavenly country just beyond the next ridge before they took up arms, but once the cannons began shredding their ranks the soldiers may have faced death with no more equanimity than did Hemingway. The Victorian sea of faith was already ebbing. By the time the moderns had finished with the dreamy memory of the Civil War amidst the carnage of the Western Front, and Death had become the whore of war, it is surprising anyone had the stomach for glory. Yet that did not prevent Tarawa, Stalingrad, Dresden, or Hiroshima.