Lightning Gods And Feathered Serpents The Public Sculpture Of El Tajn Rex Koontz by Rex Koontz 9780292718999, 0292718993 instant download after payment.

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.