Oswaldo Chinchilla

Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos is an archaeologist specializing on the complex societies of ancient Mesoamerica. His research interests include Mesoamerican art, religion, and writing, the study of ancient urbanism and social complexity with special focus on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala, and the history of archaeology in Guatemala. He has conducted extensive field research, particularly at the ancient city of Cotzumalhuapa and other sites in southern Guatemala. He co-curated the 2022 exhibition Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 2011, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Cotzumalhuapa art and archaeology. His books, Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya (2017) and Imágenes de la Mitología Maya (2011) offer innovative views and methodological breakthroughs in the study of ancient Maya religion and art. He contributed a volume on the Cotzumalhuapa sculptures, published in the prestigious series Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (2017). Other books include Cotzumalguapa, la Ciudad Arqueológica: El Baúl-Bilbao-El Castillo (2012), and the edited volume Arqueología Subacuática: Amatitlán, Atitlán (2011). He also coedited The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing (2001), and The Technology of Maya Civilization: Political Economy and Beyond in Lithic Studies (2011).

Selected Publications

• 2023. South Meets North: Cotzumalhuapa and the Origins of Flower World Representations at Chichén Itzá. In When East Meets West: Chichén Itzá, Tula, and the Postclassic Mesoamerican World, edited by Travis W. Stanton, Karl Taube, Jeremy Coltman, and Nelda Issa Marengo, pp. 149-165. BAR Publishing, Oxford. 
  Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo

• 2022. Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
  Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo, James A. Doyle, and Joanne Pillsbury, editors

• 2020. The Southern Cities: Urban Archaeology in Pacific Guatemala and Eastern Soconusco, Mexico. Journal of Archaeological Research 29:47-91.
  Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo

• 2020. Where Children Are Born: Centipedes and Feminine Sexuality in Ancient Mesoamerica. In Sorcery in Mesoamerica, edited by Jeremy D. Coltman and John M. D. Pohl, pp. 206-235. University Press of Colorado, Louisville, Colorado.
  Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo

• 2017. Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya. Yale University Press, New Haven. 
  Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo

• 2017. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Volume 10, Part 1: Cotzumalhuapa. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge. 
  Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo