Our article has just published in the latest issue of Science (Vol. 336 no. 6082 pp. 714-717), co-authored by William Saturno, David Stuart, Anthony Aveni and Franco Rossi.
Article Abstract
Maya astronomical tables are recognized in bark-paper books from the Late Postclassic period (1300 to 1521 C.E.), but Classic period (200 to 900 C.E.) precursors have not been found. In 2011, a small painted room was excavated at the extensive ancient Maya ruins of Xultun, Guatemala, dating to the early 9th century C.E. The walls and ceiling of the room are painted with several human figures. Two walls also display a large number of delicate black, red, and incised hieroglyphs. Many of these hieroglyphs are calendrical in nature and relate astronomical computations, including at least two tables concerning the movement of the Moon, and perhaps Mars and Venus. These apparently represent early astronomical tables and may shed light on the later books.
by James Doyle (Brown University) and Stephen Houston (Brown University)
The impersonation of gods abounds in Classic Maya texts and imagery (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006: 270-275). Humans donned elaborate masks and costumes to channel deities and to perform dances or reenactments of mythic actions. It is now clear that there were Late Preclassic antecedents to such ritual: for example, Kaminaljuyu Stela 11 displays the “x-ray” view of a lord’s face within the head of the Principal Bird Deity (Fields and Reents-Budet, eds., 2005: Cat. 6, 104-105; see also here). The appearance of a possible masked performer in the Preclassic is hardly surprising. Places for performance and assembly– visible pyramid apices, tiered façades, and plaster-covered plazas — reached their pinnacle size at many Lowland Maya sites.
A recent discovery by the important project at El Mirador, Guatemala, consists of a long set of stucco friezes that depicts two more examples of Late Preclassic deity impersonation (Figure 1). The façades are located in a prominent pathway running east-west in the center of the “Central Acropolis.” They appear to front a large plaza at the base of the “Tecolote” pyramid complex, perhaps adorning part of an ancient water collection system (see map). The figures on the lower frieze have been associated with the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, protagonists of the colonial K’iche Maya creation story, the Popol Vuh (Hansen et al. 2011: 190). Yet, in our view, these figures represent god impersonators and bear no secure connection to twins in the Popol Vuh.
Figure 1. 3D scans of El Mirador friezes, University of South Florida, Alliance for Integrated Spatial Technologies, http://aist.usf.edu/projects/elmirador/.
The lower, more prominent façade contains three beings: two humans with large headdresses, and the large profile head. The figure on the left, whose face is partially damaged, wears a headdress and shell ear spools. His one visible eye has the inverted-“L” found on some early gods; his mouth displays a circular outline, his outstretched arms and bent legs conform to the pattern of many diving figures in Maya art (see Taube et al. 2010: Fig. 54A).
The central figure strikes a similar posture but in the opposite direction. Both are framed by the diagonal elements with elliptical or volute decorations that recall primordial, living sky bands. The attributes of these bands mark them as maxillae of the animate sky, complete with curved fangs and other teeth; another well-known example is present in a Late Preclassic frieze from Calakmul (Carrasco Vargas 2005: Figure 3, 4).
Figure 2: Chahk figures with curled foreheads or hair (blue) and shell ear spools (green). (a) Calakmul Frieze (drawing by James Doyle after Carrasco Vargas 2005: Fig. 3, 4); (b) Uaxactun Group H Frieze (drawing by James Doyle after Valdés 1993: Fig. 50); (c) Kaminaljuyu Stela 4 (drawing by James Doyle after Taube 1996: Fig. 16b); (d),(e) Izapa Stela 1 (drawings by James Doyle after Taube 1996: Fig. 15a, e); (f) El Mirador Lower Frieze, detail (drawing by James Doyle and Stephen Houston).
The central figure wears a simple knotted belt with an effigy head attached to his lower back. His headdress and chinstrap form the gaping jaws of what is likely a version of Chahk, the god of rain (see Taube 1996: Fig. 15, 16): the diagnostic elements are the curled forehead (or hair) and especially the Spondylus ear spool (Figure 2). The figure on the viewer’s left shares many of the same features, but with different, tufted forehead, as though referring to another aspect of the rain deity. Other such costumed diving figures with curled foreheads appear on contemporaneous stucco friezes at Uaxactun Group H (Valdés 1993: Fig. 50), and Calakmul (Carrasco Vargas 2005: Figure 3, 4).
The profile head on the far right of the lower frieze resembles the many depictions of mountains as breathing beasts in Preclassic and Classic period iconography, such as the witz depicted on the North Wall at San Bartolo (Saturno et al. 2005: 14-21). Perhaps there was another such head on the opposite side, framing this scene as a mythic, mountainous locale from which clouds emerged. This trope in particular goes back to Chalcatzingo Monument 1 (Grove, ed. 1987:115-117) and highlighted in variant form on the San Bartolo North Wall.
The upper façade is an early water-band that contains two large water birds with outstretched wings. The water-band passes over two bulbous cloud or muy elements with swirling volutes, another, archaic guise of Chahk (see Stone and Zender 2011: 142-143). A fascinating detail of the upper frieze is that the artist(s) gave faces – in an archaic, almost “Olmec” style with a snarling upper lip and a single tooth – to the clouds, as if they are peering upward at the water. The central bird figure has the head of an older deity within its breast. This enigmatic bird-god figure appears on many Classic Maya vessels (e.g., K8538, K6181, K6438, K3536, see Finamore and Houston, eds. 2010: 104; see also a related Spondylus shell creature on stuccoed vessel K2027), and is not well understood. The bird on the left of the upper frieze (see here) is likely a cormorant, which possibly would have held a fish in its beak (see K6218, Finamore and Houston, eds. 2010: 103). The water band, probably representing flowing streams of water, as well as avian themes are also present on a slightly later stucco altar from Aguacatal, Campeche (Houston et al. 2005).
The stucco artists of El Mirador were concerned with rain, clouds, waters, Chahk, and water birds that all flow together in the Maya view of grand, hydrological cycles. Perhaps the friezes show a situational composition – a Late Preclassic view of the rainy sky and the water that swirls around in it. Or, perhaps the artists commemorated a narrative of the first rainmakers and their watery assistants. In this way the rulers of El Mirador, through the mechanism of deity impersonation, presented themselves as supernatural agents who controlled the rain. The lower freeze shows the mountains breathing out water as the Chahk impersonators swim in the lower sky; the upper frieze then shows the high altitude products of impersonation, clouds that embody Chahk, and undulating water.
REFERENCES CITED
Carrasco Vargas, Ramón. 2005. The Sacred Mountain: Preclassic Architecture in Calakmul. In Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship. Los Angeles: LACMA/Scala Publishers.
Fields, Virginia M., and Dorie Reents-Budet. 2005. The Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship. Los Angeles: Scala Publishers/LACMA.
Finamore, Daniel, and Stephen Houston, eds. 2010. The Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hansen, Richard D., Edgar Suyuc Ley, and Héctor E. Mejía. 2011. Resultados de la temporada de investigaciones 2009: Proyecto Cuenca Mirador. In XXIV Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2010. B. Arroyo, L. Paiz Aragón, A. Linares Palma, y A. L. Arroyave, eds. Pp. 187-204. Guatemala: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.
Houston, Stephen, Karl Taube, Ray Matheny, Deanne Matheny, Zachary Nelson, Gene Ware, and Cassandra Mesick. 2005. The Pool of the Rain God: An Early Stuccoed Altar at Aguacatal, Campeche, Mexico. Mesoamerican Voices 2: 37-62.
Houston, Stephen, and David Stuart, and Karl Taube. 2006. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Saturno, William, Karl Taube, David Stuart, with Heather Hurst. 2005. The Murals of San Bartolo, El Petén, Guatemala Part 1: The North Wall. Ancient America 7.
Stone, Andrea, and Marc Zender. 2011. Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guid to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Taube, Karl, William Saturno, David Stuart, and Heather Hurst. 2010. The Murals of San Bartolo, El Petén, Guatemala Part 2: The West Wall. Ancient America 10.
Taube, Karl. 1996. The Rainmakers: The Olmec and Their Contribution to Mesoamerican Belief and Ritual. In The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership. Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum.
Valdés, Juan Antonio. 1993. Arquitectura y escultura en la Plaza Sure del Grupo H, Uaxactún. In Tikal y Uaxactún en el Preclásico. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 96-121.
One of my favorite Maya artworks is this intricately incised bone dating to about 600 A.D., now on display in the Dallas Art Museum. It’s been published and analyzed before (sort of), and is well-known to most scholars, but whenever I see the original I’m always stunned by its tiny size — less than 10 cms. in height.
The scene depicts the crowning of a king, in all likelihood a mythical figure based on the Maize God. An elderly gent resembling God L holds aloft an elaborate royal headdress in the form of the Principal Bird Deity, shown also perched on the celestial band above the throne. The iconography references, I think, an important storyline from ancient Maya origin mythology, where a great supernatural bird — probably based on an eagle, and a basic symbol of royal authority since Preclassic times — descended from the heavens to engender kingship as a political and cosmological paradigm. The story is depicted on many other objects, including the famous Blowgunner Vase (Kerr 1226), where we see a melding of this ancient story with somewhat different motifs and episodes of the later Popol Vuh epic. Marc Zender has traced some aspects of it as well in his discussion of the verb ehm, “to descend.” The San Bartolo mural shows the most vivid scene of the Principal Bird’s descent on the center of its west wall, as Bill Saturno, Karl Taube and I will present in a formal publication in the coming year.
The date recorded on the Dallas Bone is “5 K’an End of Yaxk’in,” perhaps a day of great mythological significance. I say this because in the 260-day calendar 5 K’an comes just two days after 3 Ik’ — the single day written next to with the descending Principal Bird image at San Bartolo. That, in turn, comes two days after the important 1 Ajaw featured in the Blowgunner Vase, and which obviously served as the basis of the name Hun Ajaw (meaning in a mythical sense “First, Original Lord”). So, for what it’s worth, we have three very different references to the myth of the bird that fall into a nice sequential arrangement: 1 Ajaw – 2 Imix – 3 Ik’ – 4 Ak’bal – 5 K’an. I’m as yet unsure what this all means, but the pattern seems worth further consideration.
One interesting aspect of the Dallas Bone’s design is the careful arrangement of the text within the scene. The four glyphs above the headdress provide the date (5 Kan End of Yaxk’in) and the main verb (k’ahlaj, “it was fastened…”). Then the text passes over to the floating glyph at far left, labeling the headdress (? hu’n), before it continuing down to the three glyphs above the image of the seated recipient, reading t-u-baah Lem ? Ixiim?, “…upon the head of Shiny-?-Maize(?).” It’s a fine example of an artist’s carefully considered integration of text and image.
A few newly unearthed hieroglyphic texts from San Bartolo, all Preclassic in date, exhibit a distinctive curved “whiplash” line that runs beneath and along the right side of some signs. This may represent little more than artistic flair, but the line could also hold some meaning or function still unclear. When visiting the Museo Miraflores in Guatemala City last year, I was fascinated to find the same linear feature on a glyph incised into the text panel of Stela 21 from Kaminaljuyu, a Late Preclassic fragment with a style that surely dates to about the same time as the murals.
The well preserved Stela 21 glyphs, both undeciphered, show an infixed le syllable in the head sign at left, and a -la suffix on the block at right.
You must be logged in to post a comment.