GARCIA VALGAÑÓN, Rocío - La representación de las ancianas mayas prehispánicas de Tierras Bajas desde una perspectiva de género. TESIS DOCTORAL

Tesis doctoral de Rocío García Valgañón (2016), publicada en la página web de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Departamento de Historia de América II (Antropología de América). http://eprints.ucm.es/39216/1/T37807.pdfhe objectives of this dissertation are six, each of which has been developed in a different chapter. The first objective was to describe the current status of the issue of studies about elderly pre-Columbian Mayan people and its relationship to women’s and gender studies. The second objective was to ascertain what pre-Columbian Mayans considered to be elderly, what their appearance was, and what physical aspects or features marked them as elderly people. The third objective was to describe which of these physical markers allow us to identify elders in the Iconography, and to see how they were depicted with relation to period, medium and sex. This enabled us both to distinguish the elderly from people of uncertain age, and to research the roles they played and the themes in which they took part, paying special attention to the differences between men and women, which constitutes the fourth objective. The fifth one was to analyze the representations of elderly Mayan women. For this we have borne in mind what we have learned until know, and have compared that knowledge with textual sources, both colonial and contemporary. The goal was to ascertain whether these written sources had iconographic support and to discover the position of elderly women in their communities. Finally, a database was created with the greatest number possible of representations of elderly people, which served as a basis for present. Hopefully, it will serve for future researchs. To carry out these objectives we have used an Iconographic methodology. The lack of existing prehistoric texts has been compensated by using colonial and contemporary documents. In a first stage, the physical markers found in ancient preColumbian Maya representations have been described. To do this, we needed to know the physical changes that take place in elderly people’s bodies. In a second stage, the rules that determine such changes have been analyzed according to media, period and sex of the people represented. This has led us to the establishment of typologies...