Now shrouded in Guatemalan jungle, the traditional Maya urban of Piedras Negras flourished among the 6th and 9th centuries, while its rulers erected huge limestone sculptures carved with hieroglyphic texts and pictures of themselves and kin, advisers, and captives. In
Engaging old Maya Sculpture at Piedras Negras, Guatemala, Megan E. O’Neil deals new how one can comprehend those stelae, altars, and panels by means of exploring how historic Maya humans interacted with them.
These monuments, thought of sacred, have been one of many community’s very important kinds of cultural and non secular expression. Stelae can have held the essence of rulers they honored, and the gadgets remained loci for reverence of these rulers once they died. utilizing various evidence,O’Neil examines how the types, compositions, and contexts of the sculptures invited humans to have interaction with them and the figures they embodied seems to be at those monuments now not as inert bearers of pictures yet as palpable presences that existed in actual house at particular ancient moments. Her research brings to the fore the fabric and affective strength of those robust items that have been visible, touched, and manipulated within the past.
O’Neil investigates the monuments not just in the interim in their production but in addition in later years and exhibits how they replaced through the years. She argues that the relationships between sculptures of other generations have been played in processions, during which historical Maya humans built-in ancient dialogues and ancestral commemoration into the landscape.
With assistance from greater than one hundred sixty illustrations, O’Neil finds those sculptures’ carrying on with lifestyles histories, which long ago century have integrated their fragmentation and transformation into commodities bought at the overseas paintings marketplace. laying off gentle on modern day transposition and demonstrate of those historic monuments, O’Neil’s research contributes to ongoing discussions of cultural patrimony.