Painted walls adorned the palaces, temples, tombs, caves and administrative centers of ancient Mesoamerica. Recently discovered murals have expanded the corpus of known paintings to cultural areas that have heretofore received little attention, while those outside of Teotihuacan and the Classic Maya area remain largely ignored or understudied. Meanwhile, better known murals still have much to reveal, lending themselves to fresh interpretations and material analyses.
This session aspires to revise the known corpus of Mesoamerican wall paintings, creating a fresh synthesis of their narratives, colorants, and archaeological contexts. Participants are encouraged to explore the relationship between painted walls and other media within structures, sites, regional areas, and time periods. What political or religious messages, narrative structures, or color preferences can we read in Mesoamerican painted stories? How does painting on architecture or on cave walls differ from painted imagery in books and polychrome ceramics? How do mural paintings work in concert with other narrative formats, such as sculptural relief, tableaux and curated settings, or ritual sequences? By examining paintings from various sites, we hope to better understand the common threads, and in so doing derive deeper meanings in the overall purpose of Mesoamerican wall painting.
