In the bodega of the Museo Sylvanus Morley in Tikal, Guatemala, are a number of odds-and-ends of Maya sculpture recovered from looters over the last few decades. One piece is the block illustrated here, known to many epigraphers since its publication some years ago by Karl Herbert Meyer. Its place of origin has long been a mystery, so I was happy to learn a few years ago that Ian Graham was the first to ever see the stone, in the course of his initial explorations of the ruins of Pajaral, Petén, Guatemala, in the late 1970s. He included a quick but recognizable sketch of it in his field notebook, now in the archives of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. So, the block is certainly from Pajaral, and I therefore suggest a new designation for it, following the standards of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions: Pajaral, Miscellaneous 1. I believe one or two other stones in a similar style, also looted, may be from the same inscription.

The glyphs show a partial Long Count date, best reconstructed as [9.16.]10.0.0 1 Ajaw [3 Zip] (March 11, 761).

I write this new post, the first in many weeks, from the Casa Herrera in Antigua, Guatemala. This newly restored mansion opened June 1, 2009 as the University of Texas at Austin’s new academic research center devoted to Mesoamerica and its interdisciplinary study. With the cooperation and vision of the Fundación Pantaleón, the owners of the facility, UT-Austin inaugurates what we hope will be a long-lasting and important venue for conferences, seminars, residential scholars, and international academic programs. More information will be available soon once the new website for the Casa is up and running later this summer.

We’re happy to be hosting our first formal academic event this coming week: a mini-conference on “The Future of Mayan Linguistic Research.” More gatherings of students and scholars, large and small, are in the works for later this year and next.

Very soon I and others will be getting back to posting more blog entries on epigraphy and archaeology; in the meantime I simply want to share my own excitement about the Casa Herrera’s potential in the coming years as an important place for intellectual exchange and creativity, in the heart of the Maya world.

TO BE LIKE GODS: DANCE IN ANCIENT MAYA CIVILIZATION

by Matthew G. Looper

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, 2009

$40.20 with website order discount

Description from the UT Press catalog:

The Maya of Mexico and Central America have performed ritual dances for more than two millennia. Dance is still an essential component of religious experience today, serving as a medium for communication with the supernatural. During the Late Classic period (AD 600-900), dance assumed additional importance in Maya royal courts through an association with feasting and gift exchange. These performances allowed rulers to forge political alliances and demonstrate their control of trade in luxury goods. The aesthetic values embodied in these performances were closely tied to Maya social structure, expressing notions of gender, rank, and status. Dance was thus not simply entertainment, but was fundamental to ancient Maya notions of social, religious, and political identity.

Using an innovative interdisciplinary approach, Matthew Looper examines several types of data relevant to ancient Maya dance, including hieroglyphic texts, pictorial images in diverse media, and architecture. A series of case studies illustrates the application of various analytical methodologies and offers interpretations of the form, meaning, and social significance of dance performance. Although the nuances of movement in Maya dances are impossible to recover, Looper demonstrates that a wealth of other data survives which allows a detailed consideration of many aspects of performance. To Be Like Gods thus provides the first comprehensive interpretation of the role of dance in ancient Maya society and also serves as a model for comparative research in the archaeology of performance.

Order directly from the UT Press website.

Over the course of several visits to Bonampak, Chiapas, I’ve been intrigued by the unusual design of the site, and the way its buildings and plaza clearly “face” out toward the range of hills to the northeast. A great many Maya buildings exhibit architectural orientations of one sort or another, but few if any whole sites are so clearly oriented toward one particular direction. 

Figure 1. Topographic map of Bonampak, Chiapas, adapted from Paillés (1986).

As one can see in the accompanying map (Figure 1), the principal structures of Bonampak are built on the side of a natural hill, probably once named Usij Witz, “Vulture Hill.” The buildings generally face over the large open plaza that gives the site its clear orientation, about 30 degrees east of north. I find it remarkable that this orientation faces precisely in the direction of the far larger site of Yaxchilan, located on the Río Usumacinta some 24 kms. distant (Figure 2). To my knowledge, this is a unique instance of a entire site’s ceremonial layout reflecting an orientation toward another, distant center.

Figure 2. Google Earth view, showing line of orientation between Bonampak and Yaxchilan. The high ridge between them prevents any direct line of sight.

Inscriptions at Bonampak show very strong historical and political ties to Yaxchilan during the Classic period. According to the main text of Structure 1’s murals, the late ruler Yajaw Chan Muwaan II assumed the throne under the auspices of Yaxchilan’s king Shield Jaguar II.  He was also married to a Yaxchilan woman, depicted on Stela 2 as well as in the murals. Two of Yajaw Chan Muwaan’s monuments, Stela 1 (780 A.D.) and a lintel from Structure 1 (791 A.D.), exhibit carver’s signatures citing artisans from the court of Yaxchilan. Moreover, a much earlier local Bonampak ruler named Yajaw Chan Muwaan was said to have been placed in office by the contemporaneous Yaxchilan king nearly two centuries before, in the year 600 A.D. 

Throughout Bonampak’s history, then, the ties between the two sites were extremely close, with Yaxchilan clearly the more larger and dominant of the two. Given what we know of architectural development of Bonampak, its overall orientation toward Yaxchilan seems to have been established early, perhaps when Yaxchilan’s ruler began exerting their political authority in the region in the sixth century. By the end of eighth century, in the reign of Yajaw Chan Muwaan II, the same linear axis continued to be emphasized, with Yaxchilan’s “presence” strongly indicated in the sculpture as well as in the murals.

(I would like to thank Stephen Houston, Charles Golden and Andrew Scherer for their emailed comments and feedback on the issue of Bonampak’s orientation, placing it in valuable regional context.)

Reference:

Paillés, Maria de la Cruz. 1986. El nuevo mapa topográfico de Bonampak, Chiapas. Primer Coloquio Internacional de Mayistas, Tomo I, pp. 277-302. México: UNAM.

In 1990, my friend Dr. Oswaldo Chichilla Mazariegos oversaw exploratory excavations at a small elite architectural compound at Dos Pilas known as Group N5-6 (Chinchilla Mazariegos 1990).  In the course of his excavations he discovered several beautifully carved blocks in the interior chamber of Structure N5-21, the largest of the buildings in the group.  These included sculpted masonry “legs” for a bench or throne, each depicting kneeling humans figures with duck-bills with their hand aloft. These were clearly once Wind God supports for the bench. Also found by Chinchilla were four carved stones that must have formed one of the two upper side panels of the same bench-throne, depicting a seated K’inich Ajaw, or Sun God (see figure). Here I present my drawing of the sculpture, based on a field drawing I  made from the original stones in 1990 while working as part of Vanderbilt University’s Proyecto Arqueológico Regional Petexbatun. This drawing has not been published before now.

K’inich Ajaw is shown seated within or in front of a nice example of a solar cartouche, adorned with bony serpent or centipede heads at its corners (only one is visible, at upper left). All in all, it is one of the finest portraits of the Sun God I know from Classic Maya sculpture. He has k’in glyphs on each arm and leg, as well as on his forehead. In his left hand the Sun God holds the head of an animal, probably a deer.  Although missing a few details, this is almost surely an example of a particular deer that appears elsewhere in Maya iconography, showing a footprint design over its eye. The “footprint deer,” as I call it, is nearly always paired with a certain old-looking human god in both iconography and in inscriptions, and I suspect the latter was depicted on the whatever image must have accompanied this Sun God on the N5-21 bench.  Their meanings remain obscure, but there’s good reason to think the two have some sort of opposed or complementary meanings, perhaps associated with solar phenomena.

I hope I will be able to track down my drawings of the two Wind God supports of the throne and post them sometime in the future.

* * *

Reference

Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo. 1990. Operación DP14: Investigaciones en el Grupo N5-6. In Proyecto Arqueológico Regional Petexbatun, informe preliminar no. 2, segunda temporada, 1990, edited by Arthur A. Demarest and Stephen D. Houston. Nashville: Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University.

UPDATE (April 14, 2009): As Oswaldo mentions in his recent comment (see below), photographs of this sun god carving were published in two European exhibit catalogues, and his own drawing appeared in an article he published in 2006. Thanks to Oswaldo for the information (and of course for finding the sculpture!).

Here’s an interesting news tidbit, from a recent Times article on new chemical evidence of cacao usage in the American Southwest, at the famous site of Chaco Canyon. The tall cylinder vessels found there bear a striking resemblance to the common form of Late Classic Maya cacao pots, and in fact I’ve long wondered if they could indicate a connection to Mesoamerica. Seems they do.

Mystery of Ancient Pueblo Jars is Solved, New York Times, February 3, 2009

by Stephen Houston

The story of Malinche tells us that, in some places, at some times, Mesoamericans spoke several languages: Malinche’s control of Nahuatl and Chontal [Acalan] Maya (and eventually Spanish) provided the conquistadores with essential information in their wild journey to dominance.

Malinche’s tale leads me in turn to reflect on what the Maya called their languages. The Paxbolon papers in Acalan refer to t’an [than] when describing the sum totality of a language (Smailus 1975:173), a term found across the Maya lowlands, including colonial Yukatek (Cuidad Real 2001:559) and as reconstructed in Kaufman and Norman’s valuable study of proto-Ch’olan (1984:133)[Note 1]. Colonial Tzotzil follows a similar line by calling “language” k’op (“word”) or, in the case of itself, batz’i k’op, “real,” “fine,” “true” or “pure word” (Laughlin 1988, I:162, 234-235; II:415). This accords with the common perception that all other languages — i.e., those spoken by people other than my own! — have some suspect or degraded quality. The linkage of these terms to broader notions of reason or sense, equally attested in these sources, and to social congress (including sexual relations) places such words squarely in the realm of meaningful and socially bonding vocalization. T’an represents the essence of what it was to be human.

The emphasis, then, was not on Ferdinand de Saussure’s langue, an abstract notion of language distinct from utterance. Rather, it stressed parole, the ordered, sensible vocalizations themselves. For this reason, the “mouth” or even “lips,” ti’ in Tzeltalan and Ch’olan languages, chi’ in Yukatekan, plays and played an unavoidable role in their formation. And hence, of course, labels for languages like Ch’olti’, “mouth [utterance] of the milpa,” or its descendant Ch’orti’. The former is known by at least in the seventeenth-century as a reference to the language of such crucial importance to Maya decipherment (Robertson et al. in press). Further, as has been known for some time in Maya epigraphy, words for “mouth” are documented syllabically with ti-i and as a logograph first identified in the early 1990s by David Stuart: TI’, a sign of a human face that became progressively stylized through time.

It is the latter glyph that interests us here. The Museo Príncipe Maya in Coban, Guatemala, contains a fragmentary panel showing a bound captive, with clothing perforated in the manner usual with such figures (Figure 1). He is probably kneeling, but his legs are concealed behind what appears to be an architectural element. His face is hacked away, too, like so many other Maya sculptures. The text to the bottom right captions the figure, u-KAN-na YAX-to-ko BAHLAM, “his guardian [?], New/First/“Grue”-Cloud Jaguar.” The inscription to the top, of less certain referent, reads: u-KAN-? AJ-?-TI’-‘i…K’AHK’-*AJAW-wa.

When shown my photograph of the panel, David Stuart pointed out its similarity to a sculpture I had drawn at Dos Pilas back in 1984—this is Panel 2, to the south side of Hieroglyphic Stairway 1 (Figure 2). (At many sites in the Pasión River drainage, hieroglyphic stairways display such panels to either side of their outset steps.) Panel 2 had the same kind of caption, the same captive theme, and approximately the same dimensions. Moreover, as I recall, a more eroded panel nearby, Panel 3, suggested a more elaborate tableau, stretched across several sculptures. I have little doubt that Dave is right, and that the Museo Príncipe Maya panel was extracted from near Hieroglyphic Stairway 1, perhaps from its northern side, and from a building I mapped in 1986 and designated Structure L4-35. To my knowledge, the structure was never excavated by the later Dos Pilas/Petexbatun Project. It deserves far closer study.

There is more, taking us back to Malinche. With a credible connection to Dos Pilas, the Príncipe Maya panel presents the opportunity to scan for related names of historical personages. It is highly likely that such a name occurs to the top of the panel, in the area reading u-KAN-? AJ-?-TI’-‘i…K’AHK’-*AJAW-wa. The final title (or a linked one) has been studied by Dave and separately by Marc Zender as a courtly, even priestly epithet employed by secondary lords at sites like Palenque. The recognizable sequence, however, is that between a captioned secondary figure on Dos Pilas Panel 19 (Figure 3) and the Príncipe Maya panel. The latter example is eroded or chipped in part, but enough remains to discern what is probably the same name, “guardian [?] of he of the nine [or many] mouths,” followed by a title consistent with secondary status. Even the style of the glyphs is similar, especially the “snake” version of the “guardian [?]” expression. The Príncipe Maya panel must date to the approximate time of Ruler 4, the final known ruler of Dos Pilas and the king who commissioned Panel 19.

When Panel 19 was excavated in 1990, Stuart and I commented on its intriguing content. In this instance, “guardianship” (the term has remaining ambiguities) seemed to relate to two figures attending the heir of Ruler 4. On Panel 19 they hover protectively as the heir undertakes what is presumably his first bloodletting. Thus, guardianship was not always about war captives, as elsewhere on the Príncipe Maya panel, but rather about “governorship” or “tutorship” of a key figure at the royal court. Moreover, the other “guardian” seemed from his title to come from Calakmul, by this point a long-standing ally of Dos Pilas. Notably, that figure is described as the “guardian [?] of the youth [ch’ok].”

Better preserved detail would deepen the story. Yet, plausibly, a guardian figure at Dos Pilas described his young charge as a “person of the nine [many] mouths.” Or, to extend that meaning, a “person of many languages.” (In the inscriptions, “nine” might have communicated a good plurality, without the overwhelming, nearly “countless” connotation of “8,000,” more properly applied to gods.) Could this have been one of the duties of a tutor from a distant capital, to impart several languages to his charge? I propose this mindful of other readings, such as “he of the many words,” a suitable description for an orator…and many a windbag professor!

Despite the proviso, this may be a unique allusion in Maya inscriptions to the very concept of multilingualism in the Classic world, and to its role as a particular accomplishment of elites.

Note 1. I follow John Robertson in preferring a label like “common Ch’olan,” in that it captures the hypothetical derivation of the “language” from what is held in common among its descendants, with due regard for shifts over time. As an adjective, “proto-” may be too assertive in implying an existential integrity beyond the limits of reconstruction.

Figure 1. Museo Príncipe Maya panel, with detail (Photograph by S. Houston)

Figure 2. Dos Pilas, Panel 2 (drawing by Stephen Houston)

Figure 3. Figure from Dos Pilas, Panel 19, with detail enlarged (drawing by David Stuart)

REFERENCES

Ciudad Real, Antonio de. 2001 Calepino maya de Motul, ed. R. Acuña. Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés.

Kaufman, Terrence S., and William M. Norman. 1984 An Outline of Proto-Cholan Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary. In John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, eds., Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, 77-166. Publication No. 9. Albany: Institution for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.

Laughlin, Robert M. 1988 The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán. 3 vols. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 31. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Robertson, John, Danny Law, and Robbie Haertel. In press Colonial Ch’olti’: A Translation and Analysis of the 17th Century “Morán Manuscript”. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Smailus, Ortwin. 1975 El Maya-Chontal de Acalan: Análisis lingüístico de un documento de los años 1610-1612. Centro de Estudios Mayas Cuaderno 9. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

VEILED BRIGHTNESS: A HISTORY OF ANCIENT MAYA COLOR

by Stephen Houston, Claudia Brittenham, Cassandra Mesick, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Christina Warinner

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, 2009

$40.20 with website order discount

Description from the UT Press catalog:

Color is an integral part of human experience, so common as to be overlooked or treated as unimportant. Yet color is both unavoidable and varied. Each culture classifies, understands, and uses it in different and often surprising ways, posing particular challenges to those who study color from long-ago times and places far distant. Veiled Brightness reconstructs what color meant to the ancient Maya, a set of linked peoples and societies who flourished in and around the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and Central America. By using insights from archaeology, linguistics, art history, and conservation, the book charts over two millennia of color use in a region celebrated for its aesthetic refinement and high degree of craftsmanship.

The full description and order details are now on the UT Press on-line catalog.

Some years ago Linda Schele took photographs (one below) of a partial stucco inscription at Tonina.  I have never seen this personally, and I have no idea where it is at the ruins.  Despite its murky details and the thick moss in places, I think the glyphs can be tentatively teased out as follows (reconstructed elements are in square brackets):

pA1: [10-4-WINIK-ji-ya] 

pB1: 16-HAAB-ya

pA2: u-ti-[ya]

pB2: [8]-AJAW

pA3: I-u-ti

pB3: 10-OK

pA4: [18]-TZIKIN-ni (the month “Xul”)

pB4: U-3-?-TE’(?)

So, we have a straightforward calendrical reckoning here, a distance number of 16.4.10 linking 8 Ajaw to a later date written as 10 Ok 18 Xul. This can only be:

9.13.0.0.0   8 Ajaw 8 Wo

9.13.16.4.10   10 Ok 18 Xul

These are two familiar dates at Tonina.  The first is obviously a key k’atun-ending, much recorded in the site’s inscriptions. The second date. as seen in an earlier post here on Maya Decipherment, is a station of the strange 9.2.5 “chinstrap” cycle recorded in several Tonina inscriptions, but nowhere else.  This was the third such station in the reign of the ruler K’inich Baaknal Chahk, and the final semi-preserved glyph may simply mark this. There I can just make out a possible “chinstrap” sign after U-3-, and above what could be a Pax patron head variant of TE’. The name of the king would have likely followed just after this. 

Might anyone know just where this text is located at Tonina? Do the poor glyphs still even exist? I’m not sure when Linda took her slide, but I suspect it was on a visit no later than the mid-90s.  If anyone has info, I would much appreciate hearing it.

UPDATE: I had assumed this is of stucco, perhaps still attached to a masonry wall somewhere. But I could be wrong — looking again, it could be a stone fragment.

January 23, 2009 will mark 100 years since the birth of the great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909-1985), best known for her discovery of the extensive historical content in Maya art and inscriptions. The upcoming anniversary will be a excellent time to reflect on Tania’s remarkable career and her contributions to Mesoamerican research.