El Tajin, an ancient Mesoamerican capital in Veracruz, Mexico,
has long been admired for its stunning pyramids and ballcourts
decorated with extensive sculptural programs. Yet the city's
singularity as the only center in the region with such a wealth of
sculpture and fine architecture has hindered attempts to place it
more firmly in the context of Mesoamerican history. In Lightning
Gods and Feathered Serpents, Rex Koontz undertakes the first
extensive treatment of El Tajin's iconography in over thirty years,
allowing us to view its imagery in the broader Mesoamerican context
of rising capitals and new elites during a period of fundamental
historical transformations.
Koontz focuses on three major architectural features--the
Pyramid of the Niches/Central Plaza ensemble, the South Ballcourt,
and the Mound of the Building Columns complex--and investigates the
meanings of their sculpture and how these meanings would have been
experienced by specific audiences. Koontz finds that the
iconography of El Tajin reveals much about how motifs and elite
rites growing out of the Classic period were transmitted to later
Mesoamerican peoples as the cultures centered on Teotihuacan and
the Maya became the myriad city-states of the Early Postclassic
period.
By reexamining the iconography of sculptures long in the record,
as well as introducing important new monuments and contexts,
Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents clearly demonstrates El
Tajin's numerous iconographic connections with other areas of
Mesoamerica, while also exploring its roots in an indigenous Gulf
lowlands culture whose outlines are only now emerging. At the same
time, it begins to uncover a largely ignored regional artistic
culture of which Tajin is the crowning achievement.
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