Visual and Material Surfaces in the Ancient Americas

Surfaces are everywhere. They create textures that invite touch, radiate sheens that dazzle the eye, and cover interiors to protect them. Historiographically, surfaces have been interpreted through formal and material analysis that understands these layers as untethered exteriors. But a surface can also transform a thing by way of additive, extractive, and grafted means. Indeed, in the ancient Americas, natural and manmade surfaces could animate and change what lay below, as well as extend into and interact with the world around them. Masks worn on the face could transform performers into sacred figures; glyphs carved into rocky outcrops could create haptic texts; impressions from stamps and cords could generate topographic ceramics; and woven cloth hung on architecture and draped over rocks could localize the sacred. But what and where are the contours of a surface? For instance, is a carving a surface, or does it simply modify it?

A surface, therefore, is a juncture: a constitutive part of the object, natural or manmade, that can be experienced and/or manipulated but that also reveals intentionality, ideology, and greater world. This panel seeks to confront surface as an apparatus and plumb its depths, namely in how ancestral Indigenous communities have historically distinguished and understood these visual and material layers. In taking the ancient Americas as our geographic and temporal scope, we seek scholarly and interdisciplinary interventions that uproot, redefine, and engage with the concept of “the surface” outside of Euro-American conventions.