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Storytelling plays an important role in societies throughout the world, yet in ancient indigenous American societies, visual expression, pictorial images and performance contexts seem to have enjoyed relationships that differed in significant ways from those commonly articulated in Europe and elsewhere. What were some of those stories? How were they expressed and how were they meant to be understood by interlocutors and audiences? While some visual traditions may have developed modes of expression employing phonetically informed structures of signs and symbols, for example codices and inscribed texts, others were pictorially based, depending on oft-repeated icons, architectural contexts or systems of broadly understood social cues for transmission of information. Such narratives might be expressed as pictographies or as symbolic repertories integrated with costuming, special events and public performance elements. This session seeks papers that address the topic of narratives in Ancient American art. Papers may approach the topic of narrative in a variety of ways, including the identification of particular narratives in the Ancient Americas, the examination of graphic systems used to record narratives, the relationship that narratives have with oral traditions and performance, and the roles narratives and their retelling played within the larger community. We welcome papers from scholars working in all areas of the Ancient Americas through the early Colonial Period.