History Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
Grouped by the shape of the gap rather than its subject: what sort of thing is unresolved.
Filter By Specialty 99 fields, 1 selected
Showing 1 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.
iconography 1
Recorded as unresolved.
Jaguar
What did the were-jaguar infant motif mean to the Olmec who carved it?
Open Jaguar
Why It Is Open The were-jaguar infant is one of the most frequent and unmistakable figures in Olmec sculpture, appearing across major sites from San Lorenzo to La Venta. The Olmec left no deciphered textual record explaining their iconography, so nothing establishes whether the figure depicts a mythic birth, a were-jaguar transformation, a ruler's supernatural parentage or something else. Proposed readings are informed guesses drawn from later Mesoamerican parallels rather than conclusions drawn from Olmec sources themselves.
What Would Settle It Decipherment of a securely dated Olmec or Epi-Olmec inscription that names or glosses the figure, or a controlled excavation context, an offering, a burial or a workshop, that ties a were-jaguar sculpture to an identifiable ritual practice.
Expertise Needed Mesoamerican archaeology, epigraphy
Question posed in
Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).