The Rabbit’s Book: Reading the Princeton Vase in its Historical Context
The Institute of Fine Arts
The Pre-Columbian Society of
New York Lecture Series
with Dr. Joanne Baron
The Princeton Vase is the most celebrated pre-Columbian object in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum. First exhibited by Michael Coe at the Grolier Club in New York in 1971 and first published in the same show’s catalog, it prompted Coe to coin the new term, “Codex Style,” to describe its execution of fine black line and red highlight upon a cream background. Yet even after decades of study and exhibition, the interpretation of the vessel’s iconography remains uncertain. Once believed to depict an episode involving the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh, more recent scholars have noted the inconsistencies between these deities and the characters depicted on the vessel. In this talk, I will offer an entirely different interpretation of the vase, drawing on a new reading of its hieroglyphic text, a comparison to the Postclassic codical tradition, and attention to recent discoveries about the political history of the period in which Codex Style vessels were produced.
Joanne Baron is the Peter Jay Sharp, Class of 1952, Curator and Lecturer in the Art of the Ancient Americas at the Princeton University Art Museum. She specializes in the art, archaeology, and writing of Ancient Mesoamerica, with a particular interest in Classic Maya ceramics, iconography, and inscriptions. She has conducted field research at archaeological sites in Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras and directed the La Florida Archaeology Project in Guatemala, where she oversaw excavations, artifact analysis, epigraphy, and public outreach. Baron’s scholarship focuses on the politics of the ancient Maya, its relationship to economic and religious institutions, and how these relationships were expressed through art and writing. She has published extensively on Maya patron deities, including her 2016 book, Patron Gods and Patron Lords: The Semiotics of Classic Maya Community Cults. She has also explored the monetization of textiles and chocolate during the Classic period (250-900 C.E.) and how scenes on painted ceramics contributed to the spread of these economic changes. Before Princeton, Baron taught for both the University of Pennsylvania and for Bard Early College in Newark, NJ. She also brings a background of working with Mesoamerican Indigenous descendent communities in the cities where she has lived, particularly Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
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