Recibido el 4 de junio de 2014; aceptado el 5 de agosto de 2015 ResumenEn arqueología se tiende a asumir implícitamente una conceptualización universal de persona asociada a la especie humana y a la noción de un cuerpo biológicamente discreto y con potencial racional. Vinculado a esto, se asume una socialidad que solo incluye a personas en cuanto agentes sociales y por lo tanto únicos productores de la realidad social. En este trabajo se hace una revisión crítica de estas categorías comenzando por considerar que nuestra noción de persona -entiéndase la de un académico de clase media-es resultado de procesos históricos más propios de la sociedad occidental y moderna que de las sociedades que estudiamos. Posteriormente, analizaremos lo que nos aporta la etnografía acerca de esta noción en sociedades tradicionales no occidentales. Este proceso nos permite redefinir la noción de agencia en arqueología al considerar que no solo los humanos son personas sino que entidades no humanas -animales, rocas, objetos o imágenes-pueden tener también intencionalidad y agencia y afectar la realidad social. Para ello es indispensable adoptar un enfoque relacional. En este marco se analizará la noción de persona a partir de las figuras pintadas en la roca.

El arte rupestre presente en los riscos de Laguna Mensabak expresa elementos vinculados a la noción y construcción de la persona maya durante el periodo Posclásico. Para ofrecer una aproximación a la manera en que se conceptualizó a la persona en el pasado, primeramente se hace una revisión de los conceptos nativos de persona mediante la información etnográfica y lingüística maya en el marco del modelo antropológico del personhood. Posteriormente, se analizan dos paneles rupestres del Risco Mensabak y se concluye con la proposición de que la noción maya de persona durante el Posclásico en la región era de carácter dividual y permeable.

Not all societies identify themselves and the others in the same way nor do so invariably over time. At the same time, not all of them conceptualize the same notion of being and relating, nor do we have to expect that different social collectives in time and space understand objects, animals, stars, rocks, dead or places in the same way we do. Therefore, the main interest of this work is not so much discovering the function or meaning of the archaeological remains we study but trying to understand them in their own ontological parameters.Based on that, we propose starting our study from 1) the critical review of our categories in order to deconstruct their sen-ses, and 2) the reading of ethnographic information which introduce us to other forms of Being-in-the-world. From this point, we can propose and apply methodological tools in order to analyze the information from a closer ontological position to that of the groups we study. In this case, I will analyze the way in which certain images painted on the rock would have affected the transformation of the body and the identity of those who painted them. This analysis will be addressed from the relational approach through the landscape archaeology and the agency theory as analytical tools.

The notion of person among the Maya has been studied particularly for the Classic and post-contact periods. However, we know little about the Maya person in the Postclassic period. In this paper, our initial assumption is that the Postclassic rock art found in some of the cliffs of Mensabak Lake, Chiapas, conveys elements regarding the notion and construction of the Maya person. In this sense, we analyze the rock paintings and the material culture associated with the cliffs based on the anthropology of the person. For the Classic Maya, the limits of the person were relatively permeable, something that can be observed in various scenes of Classic art, given the presence of various essences emanating from the bodies of the individuals depicted therein. Permeability, in that sense, is expressed when the person is saturated by substances whose qualities influence the internal composition of the person. Here we discuss an interpretation of a rock scene from the Postclassic period, where we observe a ritual of construction of the Maya person. In addition, we conducted underwater archaeological surveys and archaeological excavations at the foot of a particular cliff, whose collected materials suggest the presence of a repeated ritual practice, where food was prepared, copal was burned and substances were exchanged with the deities.