Performance and Power at an Ancient Mesoamerican Capital: El Tajín, Veracruz, Mexico

FAIN: FT-51295-03

Rex A. Koontz
University Of Houston (Houston, TX 77204-3067)

During the tenure of my stipend I plan to complete a book on elite performance and power at El Tajín, Veracruz, Mexico. I begin my argument by identifying performance events through studies of material culture and public iconography. I then explore the way these performances encoded elite power onto the urban landscape. El Tajín’s place in Mesoamerican history is still not well understood, and yet these hypotheses on performance and power require an historical context. To this end, I combine information on recent work at the site with a critical analysis of past interpretations of chronology and culture to construct a section on the place of El Tajín in Mesoamerican history.

Associated Products

Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents (Book)
Title: Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents
Author: Rex Koontz
Abstract: El Tajín, 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 Tajín'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 Tajín 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 Tajín'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 Tajín is the crowning achievement.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/koolig.html
Primary URL Description: University of Texas Press site
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-292-7189

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