caa a22 4500 388057947 CHVBK 20180307125112.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1998 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0956536100001991 doi S0956536100001991 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0956536100001991 Deity Relationships in Mesoamerican Cosmologies [Elektronische Daten] The case of the Maya God L The study of deity images in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artworks and pictographic texts has been dominated by a concern to classify them for identification of the individual gods. The usual approach has been taxonomic classification, emphasizing the attributes consistently shared by various images to distinguish them as members of a single class (i.e., a single deity). However, identifying criteria are shared by more than one deity class, and the desired consistency in a set of traits for class membership has never been realized, such that scholars still disagree as to the proper identification of these images. This study takes a different approach, by examining the relationships among gods manifested in both imagery and text. It focuses on the Maya God L, who shares some identifying features with God M and also shares certain contexts with the God Bolon Yokte. These associations reflect their spatiotemporal alignments, with God L representing the stability of the primordial cosmic center, whereas Gods M and Bolon Yokte are "travelers” who move within the periphery. From these relationships we begin to explain not only the fluidity of deity imagery, but also how deities served as metaphoric representations of dynamic social and cosmic processes. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998 Gillespie Susan D. Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA Joyce Rosemary A. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, USA Ancient Mesoamerica Cambridge University Press 9/2(1998), 279-296 0956-5361 9:2<279 1998 9 ATM https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536100001991 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536100001991 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Gillespie Susan D. Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Joyce Rosemary A. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, USA NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Ancient Mesoamerica Cambridge University Press 9/2(1998), 279-296 0956-5361 9:2<279 1998 9 ATM CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge