Pre-Columbian Society of New York Lecture Series: Claudia Brittenham
The Interconnected Mesoamerican World
Virtual Lecture*
Advance registration is required
The Mesoamerican world was always interconnected. For over three millennia, trade, pilgrimage, migration, and warfare have linked together different regions of this linguistically and ethnically diverse territory, corresponding to modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, as well as parts of Honduras and El Salvador. Gorgeously decorated objects brought as gifts or trade goods mediated diplomatic relationships between different places; immigrants made works that recalled their homelands using the materials of their new homes; public art proclaimed affinities with a broader world. Local artists adopted, adapted, and reshaped foreign styles, making works meaningful in new contexts through acts of creative reinterpretation. Yet our models for explaining the ancient Mesoamerican past often emphasize closed cultural units, casting instances of intercultural exchange as exceptional moments rather than a baseline expectation for human experience. How might Mesoamerican history look different if we assumed that interconnection was the norm, rather than the exception? What emerges, I will suggest, is a story in which even apparently simple objects reveal dazzlingly complex histories of exchange, allowing us to imagine a premodern past that has much in common with contemporary migration, diaspora, and creativity.
Claudia Brittenham is Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is also Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, with interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, as well as The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico; The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (with Mary Miller); and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (with Stephen Houston and colleagues). Her next book focuses on the interconnectedness of the ancient Mesoamerican world.
*Zoom details will be available upon registration.