Lecture by Dr. Lucia Henderson, "Mountains of Fire: Volcanoes in Ancient Mexico and Central America"

Event Description:

This talk explores how volcanic landscapes affected the art and religious beliefs of ancient Mesoamerican cultures. Volcanoes were some of the most dramatic and imposing inhabitants of the Precolumbian living landscape. They were capped with lightning storms, wreathed in puffing smoke, and regularly erupted in fire and ash. Cataclysmic eruptions periodically destroyed entire regions, killing and displacing populations, devastating agricultural production, and interrupting trade routes. This talk investigates imagery related to volcanoes across a broad swath of Mesoamerica—including Central Mexico, Veracruz, the Guatemalan highlands, the Pacific Coast, and western El Salvador—exploring the idea that the populations that cohabitated with volcanoes shared a unique worldview or “ontology.” This included many broadly shared cosmological concepts familiar throughout Mesoamerica (like the four-cornered world), but anchored these in specific ways to the particularities of volcanic landscapes. Volcanic communities were thus linked across time and space, expressing their unique worlds through a remarkably consistent set of iconographic features that spanned vast geographies and lasted through the course of millennia.