Professor Trenton D. Barnes, PhD (Williams College)
Some Kinds of Narration: The Problem of Plurality in the Teotihuacan Walking Scenes
Humans, animals, and deities often walk in the artworks of Teotihuacan, one of the two largest cities of the ancestral Indigenous Americas. While the Teotihuacan walking scenes have only occasionally been addressed as a coherent corpus, depictions of walking humans have been more often discussed. Scholars have tended to understand their subject matter as that of groups of individuals walking in a single moment, a reading that has in turn served as one basis for understanding ancient Teotihuacan society as having perhaps been ruled by a governing council rather than monarchs. Little scholarship has probed why walking emerged as a primary subject matter of Teotihuacan artworks, and Indigenous comprehensions of what these works depict have been largely neglected. I demonstrate that alternate reading modes for Teotihuacan representations of walking humans would have been viable and perhaps more appropriate among a Mesoamerican viewership. I situate these scenes of walking humans within the broader tradition of Teotihuacan walking representations to suggest possible Indigenous significances of these works. This analysis necessitates a reevaluation of Teotihuacan’s governance structure and religious practices.
Thursday, October 10th, 2024
6:30 pm, EST
in Schermerhorn 934
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