Each major Mesoamerican culture developed its religious imagery in a distinctive fashion, although all were historically interlinked and drew from the common pool of Mesoamerican stylistic-iconographic tradition. This type of pictorialization was especially important in an area cotradition that lacked fully evolved phonetic scripts. It constituted an effective technique of visually communicating in a standardized, codified manner the basic concepts of the religious-ritual systems that played such a crucial sociocultural role in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

Issues of Interpretation

The Mesoamerican iconographic systems that were functioning at the time of the Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century can be interpreted with the aid of a broad range of data, including written sources compiled in Spanish and in the native languages. The iconographies of the earlier cultures must be studied without the assistance of texts of this type and pose much greater interpretative difficulties. The technique most often...