Presenter:
This presentation examines the ways that the ancient Maya of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize understood and represented their surroundings during the first millennium CE. While there was a rich hieroglyphic vocabulary for talking about local, foreign, and supernatural places, surprisingly few images of landscape are to be found in Classic Maya art. What are the reasons for this absence? And what changed in the 10th century CE, when painters at Chichén Itzá developed an entirely new vocabulary for representing the surrounding world?