by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

The sound comes before the sighting: that high-pitched, oscillating whine mosquitoes make as they hover nearby. The naturalist E. O. Wilson (1984) claims that humans are predisposed to  “biophilia,” a pleasing sense of affiliation with the lush, evolutionary miracle that surrounds us. With  these creatures, biophilia surely gives way to different reactions—rage, a desire to destroy, yes, E. O. Wilson, even “bioanimus”: “where is that !@#$% pest, when will it bite, can I kill it before it does?”

Few would dispute that the mosquito makes a most maddening noise, foretelling pain, itching, vexation, disease. Captain Haddock, beloved curmudgeon of the Tintin books, could not agree more—note the artist, Hergé (Georges Remi), and his idea of what these critters sound like, later proved to be the clamor of a descending helicopter (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. What mosquitoes sound like (Hergé 1960:29).

Sounds of animals are, in most languages, understood in terms of echoic mimicry, a perception, influenced by varying motivations, of what noise is seemingly heard from this or that animal: bow-wow for speakers of English, vov-vov in Swedish, the language of my youth. Perhaps, according to some researchers, the size of an animal makes a difference too, high tones associating with smaller creatures, such as birds (tweet-tweet), low tones and back vowels with bigger, lumbering beasts like cows (moo; Bredin 1996:567; see also an early formulation by Jespersen 1922:402).

The Maya region is not exactly lacking in mosquitoes. Some are small, others equipped with white-tipped legs or they shimmer with blue iridescence—their bites can be dainty, often unnoticed pricks, or, in larger ones, they can feel like painful drillings. Long ago, Karl Taube pointed out to me how striking mosquitoes were when depicted in Maya vase painting (Fig. 2; see also K1223, K2759). Rich in plumage, with dark wings (that marking was first studied in other creatures by Marc Zender), they excreted blood, and, in a curious feature, their long proboscides tended to perforate a single flower.

This last doubtless accorded with close observation in nature, but not too close, for it is based on gender confusion. The males nourish themselves with juices or nectars, while the females require blood to sustain their eggs. These respective attributes were not, it seems, minutely understood by the Maya. An overriding feature is the emphasis on the skeletal, even exo-skeletal, nature of such insects, along with an extra eye on the forehead, and, at times, leaking or smoking protuberances at their bottoms. But, for the mosquitoes, the key component is a set of two volutes, identified some time ago by David Stuart as blood scrolls. Evidently, the mosquitoes were sloppy eaters, and the excess spilled messily from their jaws.

Figure 2. Dazzling mosquito feeding repeatedly on a cormorant(?)—an image of pure, sustained pain (K2668, photograph by Justin Kerr, used with permission).

Such noxious creatures are not unique in Maya imagery. There may also be depictions of ticks or lice with hook-like talons and bloody mouths (Fig. 3). In Maya imagery, these afflict a bloated rodent, an association pointed out to me some years ago by Karl Taube, but comparison with another vase demonstrates a seemingly free alternation with mosquitoes, K1223). In both cases Chahk, the Storm God, poises to strike these bloodsuckers. With axe in hand, he takes aim at them.

Figure 3. Possible ticks or lice (K555, photograph by Justin Kerr, used with permission).

This essay began with a reference to sound. Echoic mimicry—that deeply annoying sound of mosquitoes—may explain a variant form of the ya syllable in Maya writing (Fig. 4). It is clearly skeletal, has a long beak, and disgorges bloody volutes. What is different in this example is that the creature is supplied with wings (one thrusts horizontally to viewer’s right) and, on its proboscis, is  a probable flower or gout of blood. The ya variant is likely a mosquito.

Figure 4. A mosquito in place of the syllable ya (Yaxchilan Throne 2, photograph provided by Ian Graham), compared with blood-drooling, blood dripping mosquito (K9225).

Captain Haddock may have heard BZZRRBZR, but it takes little imagination to see yayayaya (and so forth) as the perceived sound of Maya mosquitoes, segmented into a front vowel, i, gliding into a low front a and back again, along a long stream of torment foretold.

Acknowledgements   Thanks go to Karl Taube for discussing many nasty creatures over the course of our long friendship.

References

Bredin, Hugh. 1996. Onomatopoeia as a Figure and a Linguistic Principle. New Literary History 27(3):559–569.

Hergé [Georges Remi]. 1960. The Adventures of Tintin: The Calculus Affair. London: Methuen.

Jespersen, Otto. Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Wilson, Edward O. 1984. Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

by Stephen Houston (Brown University) and Marc Zender (Tulane University)

“Pictography…complicates discussions of both writing and artistic practice in a global sense” (Boone 2016:32)

In a perceptive comment, James Elkins once remarked on “the recurring fantasy that there might be such a thing as a purely visual picture, a page of writing uncontaminated by nonverbal meaning, or a chart or graph dedicated utterly to the propagation of data” (Elkins 1999:91). Posing extremes, if only to make a point about the challenges behind these categories, Elkins zeroed in on the zone of collisions between writing as a linear notation of language, meaningful notations or graphs that scholars call “semasiographs” (think of mason’s marks), and pictures that play havoc with linearity. Some images tell or allude to stories, but mostly they avoid any demand that depictions be accessed in a fixed order.

Of course, how a graph occupies space is less clear than one might think. As something to be seen, a picture does not have to be two-dimensional (reflect on Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais [1884–89], whose miseries, to be fully absorbed, must be viewed from several vantages). And what script other than Morse code, when registered visibly as dots and dashes, fails to splay out laterally? To map out these frontiers, Elkins used Venn diagrams that interlock like love rings, one of “writing,” with two others of “notation” and “picture” respectively (Elkins 1999:85–86). “Hieroglyphs,” a kind of writing bridging picture and text, occupies two overlapping circles. These systems are both pictorial and linear, referencing things in the world but also, because they express language, insisting on a particular order of reading.

There must have been some evolutionary foundation to all of this. The making of images and the cognitive networks that facilitate the recognition of objects rest on primate origins. There was, according to Stanislas Dehaene, “the partial or total invasion of a cortical territory initially devoted to a different function,” as “coded by single neurons in the primate’s visual cortex” (Dehaene 2009:72–74, 183, and fig. 2.6, for the suggestive proximity in the human brain for areas responding to rooted things [e.g., houses], faces, written words, and separable objects; n.b: Dehaene [2009:184] comments on Maya writing but only with respect to “faces…[that] denote syllables”). An unmet need in scholarship is to have laboratory imaging, by computed tomography, of responses to hieroglyphic systems, rather than the “stroke-based” scripts, the majority in the world, that attract the preponderant attention of research on the reading brain (e.g., Changizi and Shimojo 2005; Changizi et al. 2006). For them, the alphabet remains “A Great Leap Forward” (Dehaene 2009:190), with implied negative comment about hieroglyphic writing that endured, in the Egyptian case, for almost 3,600 years or, among the Maya, for 1,800 or more.

The pleasure, perhaps even the neuronal frisson of hieroglyphs, is their resolute “thingness.” They have edges, interiors, exteriors. They represent things in the world; they have perceptible mass, weight, texture, color; they toggle, in their cognitive processing, when apprehended by the brain, between image, sound, and meaning. Rather than defects, these attributes surely delighted users and readers of hieroglyphic script. The features bore social import as well, in that the solidity of things, plainly evident to the eye, lent factual assertiveness to the messages conveyed by writing. By offering playful ground for virtuosity, hieroglyphs did something else—they abetted a drive towards prestigious and assertive display in unequal societies (see Baines 2007, for ample comparison from Egypt).

Nonetheless, picture and writing operate in their own domains, as made clear by one of the principal functions of script, to label or caption images. By their nature, hieroglyphs and images are pictorial, but the writing is strongly codified as to size, spacing, regularity, albeit with scope for fun flourishes. The relation between the two is more “dialogic…each relates to the other without absorbing or being subsumed by it” (Bedos-Rezak and Hamburger 2016:2). Two examples illustrate this point. The first, from Egypt, in the Middle Kingdom tomb of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hassan (BH 3), shows captioning that may be categorized by function and content: as added by the Egyptologist Claus Jurman, light grey rectangles indicate titles, dark grey personal names, ovoids “labels of action” (Fig. 1, Jurman 2018:111, fig. 2). Such tagging tends to occur when the tomb owner appears in the scene and may be enlivened by quotations of speech. The hieroglyphs occupy the same figural field as the pictures of diligent laborers, duty bound for eternity, earnest, energetic too, but they are clearly separable. Their contiguity is what establishes the relationship between text and image. The placement of texts above the figures may also signal some of their priority in parsing the scene. The figures function almost like unread determinatives. Their final positioning (where determinatives occur in hieroglyphic phrasing) and facial orientations (the same as their labeling signs) accord with that view.

Figure 1. Tomb of Khnumhotep II, Beni Hassan (BH 3, Jurman 2018:fig. 2, adapted from Kanawati and Evans 2014:pl. 121, bottom). 

A more recent example, in The Uncourtly Lovers from c. 1484 (and now held by the Gotha Museum in Germany), shows a couple (Fig. 2). Thought at one time to be a bridal pair, the painting highlights a medieval count and his concubine, the looping scrolls above describing both the “unlawful” nature of their love and its obvious ardor—he was about to depart for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, perhaps never to return (Camille 1998:157–159). Sound is made visible here, but in elegant hand, accompanied by no open lips: here is interior, impassioned sentiment broadcast to viewers, possibly modeled on the prophetic or celestial utterances emblazoned on earlier scrolls in Western imagery (Schapiro 1996:157). In the tomb of Khnumhotep II, the texts are close by if spatially separate from the people and actions they caption; in The Uncourtly Lovers, the text is set apart on writing material. Yet both float impossibly, as though in thin air, a trait of such labeling in general. That physical impossibility tells the viewers that they are looking at a distinct kind of messaging. Labeling takes a generic image—workers laboring with energy and care, a profession of mutual devotion—and doubles down on the specifics of that scene, giving it weight, reality, grounding in a time and place, establishing who is whom, what is what, and by principles of labeling that were non-random in placement, content, and selection.

Figure 2. The Uncourtly Lovers, Master of the Housebook, c. 1484, Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha (SG 703). 

Captioning in Maya writing has only just begun to be studied in formal and comparative perspective (e.g., Houston 2018:140–152; Zender 2014:63–67). Captives may bear labels on their bodies, as though these were inscribed into unwilling flesh; connecting text to people’s lips, voluptuous lines appear to indicate a record of actual speech (Houston et al. 2006:153–163). Yet these lines are relatively rare. It is in the writing of Mexico, including the Basin of Mexico, Oaxaca, and intermediate areas, that lines exist, and with telling implications for text-picture relations in the Postclassic and early Colonial periods.

As Elizabeth Boone (1994:53) notes in her useful discussion of the scene of departure from Aztlan on page 1 of the Codex Boturini, of the three individuals depicted on this page only one, the priestess Chimalman, is named by “a round shield (chimalli) attached by a line to her head.” She further mentions that, “[e]xcept for the glyphs composing personal and place names, the graphic components on this page convey meaning without a detour through speech” (Boone 1994:54). Boone (2000:48) also highlights regional variation in the use of this convention, observing that “[i]ndividuals in the Mixtec codices are always identified by their calendrical names, which appear as a date either attached to the individual by a line or unattached nearby” (Boone 2000:48). In the Aztec case,  the principle admitted more flexibility. The lines were more optional, linking portraits with both calendar names and personal name glyphs (Boone 2000:48). This important distinction between phonetic hieroglyphs and pictorial art received relatively little attention before Boone’s work. Charles Dibble (1955:301) mentions the convention only in passing, noting that Aztec name glyphs were “attached to the nape of the neck” and that, “when the individual’s name was of secondary importance and his tribal affinity was of paramount concern, the tribal hieroglyph was attached to the neck,” as in the ethnonyms associated with the captive deities of the Stone of Tizoc (see also Zender 2008:27, Note 4). Similarly, Nicholson’s (1973:23) state-of-the-field discussion of phoneticism in Aztec writing takes the principle largely for granted, largely following Dibble’s analysis.

First, a point of evidence. Maya glyphs always had context, in that they might occur on this or that building or object. However, they also possessed a strong graphic autonomy, appearing in long columns without any image nearby. The overwhelming sense from Mexico is that hieroglyphic writing did not have the same degree of separability, in part because of the intrinsic brevity of such records: i.e., if signs were painted or carved, they had to accompany a person, place, scene or three-dimensional figure. Images found explanation and specification by hieroglyphs, yet texts were, in essence, secondary to pictorial display. The few “free-floating” signs probably related to things in close proximity. Glyphs on stone boxes (tepētlacalli) may have glossed the contents, presumed in some examples to be mortuary (see McEwan and López Luján 2009:cat. 15, 16). Other signs embellished stone plaques affixed to buildings, a palpable, massive reference if there ever was one (e.g., Matos Moctzeuma and Solís Olguín 2002:cat. 172–174), or, when combined with other day signs, arranged into four-part patterns, they represented a compact, almost emblematic totality of time and space (Matos Moctzeuma and Solís Olguín 2002:cat. 226–227; for examples from other non-Maya writing, see Chinchilla Mazariegos 2017:43, 45, with similar emphasis on direct contact).

A second observation concerns the use of lines to link text and image. In Mexican systems of writing, lines occur exclusively on flat, painted surfaces. To our knowledge, not one of these tethers exists in carved form on stone or other hard material. Such links served as a purely painterly device, and of books at that—Aztec paintings do not yield such lines either (e.g., Contreras 1994; Sisson and Lilly 1994:fig. 4). In many cases lines seem also to be optional or non-existent, so that the entire “Borgia group” of Aztec codices fails to show a single instance of such tethers. Indeed, the first demonstrably Pre-Columbian usage is from the Mixtec region of Oaxaca where, as among the Aztec, there were three ways to link text and its referent: (1) the absence of referential line; (2) a partial tethering of person to non-calendrical name sign or some part of a numbered calendrical name sign; and (3) direct contact between text and its referent. All of these options may be found in the Codex Vienna: as highlighted in Figures 3 and 4, a green circle shows a tether, a yellow circle employs direct contact to link text and pictorial referent or to enchain internal components of a text (subitized numbers and day sign; for “subitization,” see Chrisomalis 2010:376–379).

Figure 3. Referential lines contrasted with direct contact in the Mixtec Codex Vienna (c. AD 1350). 

Figure 4. Referential lines between bodies and nominal day signs, Codex Nuttall (c. AD 1400). 

Direct contact as a means of linking a text and its pictorial referent is not limited to Mixtec sources, for it appears commonly in early Colonial documents. Figure 5 juxtaposes a Pre-Columbian example, from the Codex Vienna, each day sign brushing against its specifying number, and a Colonial example from the Codex Azoyú from Guerrero, Mexico, that employs both tethers and, in three mummy bundles below, direct, almost frictional contact between name signs and bundles.

Figure 5.  Direct contact (yellow circle) as alternative to referential line (green circle), Codex Azoyú (c. 1565), Codex Vienna (c. AD 1350).

What may be Colonial in date, and an expression of cross-cultural explanation, are lines that link two different textual systems, one indigenous, the other European (Fig. 6).  A page from the Primeros Memoriales prepared by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his native collaborators portrays the Aztec Emperor Huitzilihuitl (1391–c. 1417), his name bolded in red by the painter (as <Vitziliui>), a red line leading to his name sign, but with a black tether shooting down to his head. In the Codex Mendoza, the amount of food apportioned to a youth is displayed as two tortillas and then, rather redundantly, explained further by making two lines leading to dos tortillas, “two tortillas.” Such lines permit a ready consultation between two contrastive systems of graphs. One is European (i.e., Latin in origin), the other indigenous, although, in the Primeros Memoriales, both record the same language. (This may reflect Sahagún’s encyclopedic motive, to clarify through over-specification.) A celebrated image from the Codex Vaticanus A/Ríos, p. 54r, uses such lines to connect day signs with afflicted body parts, in a supposed aid to healing (Boone 2007:109–108, fig. 61). Yet, in addition to its Mexican component, this image has clear precursors in Medieval Europe and into the ancient Near East, where astrological signs map onto the human body. In many such diagrams, lines extend from zodiacal figures to a limb or organ (Zodiac Man; see also Clark 1979, esp. fig. 45, which mentions the Aztec example; for European input into the Codex Vaticanus A, Nielsen and Reunert 2009).

Figure 6. Concurrent, cross-cultural coding after the Spanish Conquest, Primeros Memoriales (c. 1558–1585), Codex Mendoza (c. 1542).

What may be another Colonial innovation is the use of lines as effective, rapidly accessed notations of constituents in taxable households. The Codex de Santa María Asunción lays out the name of the owner (glyphic TESKA–ka–POK, for Martin Tezcapoc), hitched by a black line to a household conceived of (and depicted) as a “house” (Fig. 7).  But the rest of the diagram shows martial pairs (opposed male and female heads linked by red lines), their offspring (descending by lines at approximate midpoint of their parent’s tether), gender by use of an upper-body garment, age by relative size and whether, as with little “Joseph,” he lies in a cozy crib (Williams and Harvey 1997:72). The Christian names demonstrate a sweeping conversion of the family, which comprises, over two generations, a head of household, two brothers, a sister, and their respective families. Yet the proximity to the conquest—it took place only 23 years before—hints that this use of lines may be Pre-Columbian in origin.

Figure 7. Referential lines to the name of a pater familias and, in contrastive color, to highlight genealogical relations within a residential unit of taxation, Codex Santa María Asunción (c. AD 1544). 

A more exalted version of this genealogy comes from the Codex Cozcatzin (Fig. 8). It  employs the same red line—does this signal blood relations?—to link Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin and his two offspring by different wives (no love lost here: the children loathed each other and squabbled for decades over inheritances [Boone et al. 2017:122–123, in a section written by David Tavárez]).

Figure 8. Red-lined genealogy in the imperial Mexica family, and with red lines to individual name signs, Codex Cozcatzin (c. 1572). 

Referential lines had other uses in Mexican writing. Time and agency might be denoted by dotted or dashed lines, as in several images from the Codex Osuna  (Fig. 9). Skilled workers were linked by dark lines to their craft (e.g., albañiles, “masons,” carpinteros,  “carpenters,” etc.), and their number carefully tabulated by individual heads or, if mere brute-force labor (peones, “laborers,” by a banner for “20” in direct contact with the body of the worker—in contrast to the skilled craftsman, all brawn, little brain?). This seems to have been done on a particular day, lunes, “Monday,” as connected by dashed line to the 20 peones in the first image. Staff in hand, the Oidor Doctor Vasco Puga points with his right hand and, presto!, three natives go off to the stocks.

Figure 9. Dotted or dashed lines for ties to time and agency, Codex Osuna (c. AD 1565). 

Color performed admirably in tying a royal death and a succession in the Tira de Tepechpan (Fig. 10). The green line corresponds to one lord’s reigning years, limned in the same color, to be replaced by those in yellow for his successor (Diel 2008:47, 67).

Figure 10. Color as tether to time and event, contrasted with black line for nominal referents, Tira de Tepechpan (c. AD 1596). 

The links to time can have an almost pedantic precision, as in the Codex Mendoza, where a New Fire ceremony in the reign of Huitzilihuitl does not just reach to the square cartouche of a year sign but to the day sign itself (Fig. 11).

Figure 11. Hyper-specification of events tied to a year sign by lines, Codex Mendoza (c. AD 1542). 

The Codex Telleriano-Remensis elects for greater looseness. Year signs have an efficient, single tether leading to the mummy bundle of Huitzilihuitl and the accession of his imperial successor, Chimalpopoca (Fig. 12, left). Both events took place in the same year, so why not load one line with that shared function? The death of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga in 1548 seems to have led to slight confusion, with lines passing to the subsequent year as well (Fig. 12, right, note the error in the text, which refers to this death in “1549”). A skull dangling by line from the head of the supine bishop provides a portion of his name: TZOM/TZON “head” for the first syllable of Zumárraga (there being no u in Nahuatl, and tz often being substituted for /ṣ/ in Spanish loanwords and foreign names).

Figure 12. Joint reference with single line to tie people, events, and time, Codex Telleriano-Remensis (c. AD 1550).

Indeed, tethers may be used to provide marginalia or some clarifying afterthought. Having written na-MOL for the name Namol, the scribe (or later individual?) reconsidered the possibility of ambiguity with the “bowl” sign, which has several different readings (e.g., XIKAL, KAX, MOLKAX, etc.), and annotated the glyphs with a second tether to the “rubber” sign, OL (Fig. 13). The pronunciation was now clear. There are numerous other examples, one being the name of Lady Ilancueitl in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis 29v. Her name glyphs, IL–la–kwe, are attached to her portrait by a tether, and then, perhaps as afterthought, an additional tether links the name glyphs to KOL–^PLACE, yielding an abbreviated reference to her city of origin, Colhuacan (see Nicholson 1978:23; Whittaker 2009:66–67; Zender 2013). Similarly, on f.46r of the Telleriano-Remensis, Don Antonio de Mendoza initially receives an abbreviated glyphic label of TOSA, attached to his portrait by a tether, only for this to be later annotated with an additional tether to the syllable me (Zender 2008:28-40). Finally, an elaborately pictorial glyphic to–so on f.147v of the Calendario Tovar is directly attached to the Roman gloss Toçoztōntli to clarify its glyphic (rather than iconographic) identity (Zender 2013).

Figure 13. Second tether in the Codex Santa María Asunción, pp. 53r and 77b (c. AD 1544). 

Referential lines were not always thought necessary—again, the important Borgia group of codices eschews them altogether. But they fulfilled a practical function by showing which parts of a visual field were textual, i.e., those that did not exist solely as pictures. There is probably deeper meaning. Lines, dashes, dots, black or colored, reveal an abiding attention to disciplining the pictorial field, showing which names, actions, times, people pertain to each other. Text can hover nearby, but it was thought better by far, in some examples, to affirm that tie to pictures. Pictures had autonomy, texts did not. Images were authoritative, texts explained and undergirded that authority.

Aside from the Codex Xolotl (c. AD 1542), a document from Texcoco, Mexico, with stray marks for war, peremptory royal commands sensory action (speech cued by volutes, sight by eyeballs), the comprehensive absence of verbs in Mexican writing made this relation necessary (Boone 2016:43–44, fig. 2.9). Action is pictorial, names, places, and time glyphic, hinting that distinct systems operate here, not, perhaps, blurred or blending ones (Boone 2000:33): they afford mutual strength, a joint undertaking that works well, if one that imposes strong exegetical burdens on the reader.

Although still insufficiently theorized (see, e.g., Zender 2014:69–72), Plains Indian pictography has long been known to employ remarkably similar conventions. Thus, Garrick Mallery (1894:168) reproduces a drawing of the Hidatsa/Minitari Chief Lean Wolf (Fig. 14), observing that “[h]is name is…added with the usual line drawn from the head.” Mallery cites Lean Wolf’s own explanation of his name glyph as indicating “the outline character of the wolf, having a white body with the mouth unfinished … to show that it was hollow … i.e., lean” (Mallery 1894:168; see also Zender 2014:69–70). Similarly, the famous Hunkpapa-Lakota Chief Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake) is depicted in the ledger book of the Cheyenne artist Howling Wolf (Fig. 15), a long tether attaching his portrait to the strongly-stylized sign of a seated buffalo. Here, as in the texts of Postclassic Oaxaca and Central Mexico, the lack of verbal hieroglyphs puts the burden of narrative squarely on the pictures, thereby making a necessary distinction between them and the highly pictorial glyphs. Texts do not levitate in thin air like Middle Kingdom labels in Egypt or a curling scroll about forbidden love in late Medieval Germany. Intensely physical, unambiguous, they gather text and picture into the same space by direct, nominal, and indexical reference.

Figure 14. The Hidatsa/Minitari Chief Lean Wolf (Mallery 1894:168, fig. 74).

Figure 15. Sitting Bull Shooting Another Warrior, 1874-1875, ledger book, Howling Wolf, Southern Cheyenne (1849-1927), Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, AMAM 1904.1180.4.

References

Baines, John. 2007. Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte M., and Jeffrey H. Hamburger. 2016. Introduction. In Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective (300–1600 CE), eds. Brigitte M.Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, 1–16. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Boone, Elizabeth. 1994. Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records without Words. In Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, eds. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, 50–76. Durham: Duke University Press.

Boone, Elizabeth H. 2000. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Boone, Elizabeth H. 2007. Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Boone, Elizabeth H. 2016. Pictorial Talking: The Figural Rendering of Speech Acts and Texts in Aztec Mexico. In Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective (300–1600 CE), eds. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, 31–50. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Boone, Elizabeth H., Louise M. Burkhart, and David Tavárez. 2017. Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology No. 39. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Camille, Michael. 1998. The Medieval Art of Love. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Changizi, Mark A., and S. Shimojo. 2004. Character Complexity and Redundancy in Writing Systems over Human History. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 272(1560):267–275.

Changizi, Mark A., Q. Zhang, H. Ye, and S. Shimojo. 2006. The Structures of Letters and Symbols Throughout Human History are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scences. American Naturalist 167(5):E117–139.

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

Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2010. Numerical Notation: A Comparative History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, Charles W. 1979. The Zodiac Man in Medieval Medical Astrology. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Contreras, José E. 1994. Los murales y cerámica polícromos de la zona arqueológica de Ocotelulco, Tlaxcala. In Mixteca Puebla: Discoveries and Research in Mesoamerican Art and Archaeology, eds. H. B. Nicholson and E. Quiñones Keber, 7–24. Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos,.

Dehaene, Stanislas. 2009. Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention. New York: Viking.

Dibble, Charles E. 1955. The Aztec Writing System. In Readings in Anthropology, eds. E. Adamson Hoebel, Jesse D. Jennings, and Elmer R. Smith, 296–302. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Diel, Lori Boornazian. 2008. The Tira de Tepechpan: Negotiating Place Under Aztec and Spanish Rule. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Elkins, James. 1999. The Domain of Images. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Houston, Stephen. 2018. The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Houston, Stephen, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. 2006. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Jurman, Claus. 2018. To Show and to Designate: Attitudes Towards Representing Craftsmanship and Material Culture in Middle Kingdom Elite Tombs. In The Arts of Making in Ancient Egypt: Voices, Images, and Objects of Material Producers, 2000–1550 BC, eds. Gianluca Miniaci, Juan Carlos Moreno García, Stephen Quirke, and Andréas Stauder, 101–116. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

Kanawati, Naguib, and Linda Evans. 2014. Beni Hassan, Volume I: The Tomb of Khnumhotep II. The Australian Centre for Egyptology: Reports 36. Oxford: Aris and Phillips.

Mallery, Garrick. 1894. Picture-writing of the American Indians. Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1893. Washington, D.C. [Reprinted, Dover 1972.]

Matos Moctzeuma, Eduardo, and Felipe Solís Olguín. 2002. Aztecs. London: Royal Academy of Art.

McEwan, Colin, and Leonardo López Luján, eds. 2009. Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler. London: British Museum Press.

Nicholson, H. B. 1973. Phoneticism in the Late Pre-Hispanic Central Mexican Writing System. In Mesoamerican Writing Systems: A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 30th and 31st, 1971, ed. Elizabeth Benson, 1–46. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks.

Nielsen, Jesper, and Toke S. Reunert. 2009. Dante’s Heritage: Questioning the Multi-Layered Model of the Mesoamerican Universe. Antiquity 83(320):399–413.

Schapiro, Mayer. 1996. Words, Script, and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language. New York: George Braziller.

Sisson, Edward B., and T. Gerald Lilly. 1994. A Codex-Style Mural from Tehuacan Viejo, Puebla, Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 5(1):33–44.

Whittaker, Gordon. 2009. The Principles of Nahuatl Writing. Göttinger Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 16:47–81.

Williams, Barbara J., and H. R. Harvey. 1997. The Códice de Santa María Asunción, Facsimile and Commentary: Households and Lands in Sixteenth-Century Tepetlaoztoc. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Zender, Marc. 2008. One Hundred and Fifty Years of Nahuatl Decipherment. The PARI Journal 8(4):24–37.

Zender, Marc. 2014. The Naming Insight: Hieroglyphic Names & Social Identity in the Pre-Columbian Americas. In A Celebration of the Life and Work of Pierre Robert Colas, eds. Christophe Helmke and Frauke Sachse, 61–74. Munich, Germany: Verlag Anton Saurwein. https://www.academia.edu/11951430.

Zender, Marc. 2013. Algunas evidencia para una clase de sílabas VC en la escritura náhuatl. Paper presented at the symposium “La gramatología y los sistemas de escritura mesoamericanos”, Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, 25th-29th November, 2013, org. Dr. Érik Velásquez García. https://www.academia.edu/29081880.

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

In Western thought, much rests on Greek precedent. “Calligraphy” or “beautiful writing,” to give one example, descends from the condition of κάλλος “beauty” and -γραϕος “written” (“calligraph” and “calligraphy,” OED Online 2018). To notorious extent, “beauty” exists in the eye of the beholder. For the ancient Greeks, its meanings might slip and slide between “noble,” “well-done,” and “virtuous,” if with “the kind of appeal that inspires desire” (Konstan 2014:170). The aesthetic dimensions of “beauty” would await the Renaissance, for the Greeks of Classical times rarely applied the term to a work of art (Konstan 2014:179). When aesthetics took over, critics like Pierre Bourdieu came to see “beauty” and “taste” as “ascetic, empty…the renunciation of pleasure,” a withered husk of delight (Bourdieu 1984:493; see also Konstan 2014:186). Or, as a concept, “beauty” became a quality divorced from “sensual, practical, and ethical issues” (Nehamas 2007:3).

Calligraphy as “beautiful writing” makes sense on many levels, if couched within different traditions of practice. In China, the focus on brushstrokes led to joint evaluations of text and painting.  A vast corpus of critical literature assisted that endeavor, including glosses added to the paintings themselves (Bush and Shih 1985; Cahill 1997:5–6). The Aztecs, for their part, thought of good scribes in terms of their internal properties (“honest, circumspect, far-sighted, pensive”) but above all as “judge[s] of colors” (Dibble and Anderson 1961:28).

But what of “ugly writing”? A suitable term, “cacography,” derives from a Greek word for “ugly,” “vile,” “useless,” or, by evocative, etymological link, to excrement (Liddell and Scott 1940:124)? The Aztecs knew of such works too, made by scribes who were “dull, detestable, irritating” (Dibble and Anderson 1961:28). Painting “without luster,” a bad scribe “ruins colors, blurs them, paints askew” (Dibble and Anderson 1961:28). Interior failings resulted in bad work, sloppiness betrayed an unworthy maker. Some ugly writing might reflect biography: arising at times of apprenticeship, when learning takes place, or in old age as the hand loses muscular control. Neophytes create uneven, awkward displays of signs (Fig. 1). Or, quite simply, more general standards might lapse when larger shifts happened to convulse society. Mastery of execution, regularity of sign use, a disciplined placement of writing in relation to picture, careful choice of color, sustained evidence of confident practice—perhaps these become less important when the minds of patrons or readers weigh down with other challenges. Their discernment atrophies or fails to develop in the first place.

Figure 1. Writing board of an apprentice scribe, Dynasty 11, c. 2030 BC, wood, whitewash, and ink, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 28.9.5.

These are the attributes of some Egyptian writing during Intermediate Periods (Figures 2, 3). Hieroglyphs: baselines that swoop, askew in layout, each sign variable, lop-sided, nary a straight line in sight. Resembling crude ostraka, the underlying stone bulges or fractures with inadequate preparation and smoothing. Epigraphers usually suspend judgment. As in wise parenting, there can be no favorite children, no period better than any other. In fact, a Classic Mayanist learns this to their peril when talking to specialists in other periods. At the Brooklyn Museum, one such text is said to be, in upbeat description, “simple but lively” (Brooklyn Museum 39.1). Yet these examples distill the essence of ugly writing. The patrons must have been satisfied, for they had accepted the work and affixed them to their tombs. But broader comparisons give them failing grades. They illustrate aesthetic and scribal decline, a systemic lapse in standards, problematic writing for problematic times.

Figure 2. Stela of Khuu, Gebelein area(?), First Intermediate Period, c. 2100 BC. Turin, Museo Egizio, S.1276, acquired by Ernesto Schiaparelli about 1905 (photograph by John Baines). 

Figure 3. Stela of Tetu and Nefertjentet, First Intermediate Period, El-Assasif, Thebes, Egypt, c. 2124–1981 BC. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Rogers Fund 1919, 19.3.33. 

Ugly writing exists among the Maya. Rich in content, basically, even fully, legible in its deciphered signs, the Codex Madrid in the Museo de América has its admirers but also some detractors (Fig. 4): David Kelley (1976:15) described its “frequent errors” and many a “dyslexic lapse” across its lime-sized, Ficus-bark pages. Several scribes, perhaps up to 9, were involved in its making (Lacadena 2000:56). One, labeled “Scribe 5” by Alfonso Lacadena, is seemingly unbothered by sagging glyph-lines, and another two, his “Scribe 3” and “Scribe 8” respectively, invert spellings (mu-ti > ti-mu, nu-tz’u for tz’u-nu-*nu). A “hand” is, of course, an invention of connoisseurship (Houston 2016). If cautiously defined, it presents a reasoned hypothesis, a statistical chance, that certain attributes mark a particular artist or scribe. Here, Kelley’s “dyslexic” lapse affects at least two scribes and probably more, indicating that these “errors” of reading order reflect a variant, more opaque pattern of spellings in the place and time when the Codex Madrid was composed. Heavy, almost disproportionate lines mark some pages, the ink poorly or erratically controlled (M19, 21), and sign or glyph block size varies widely (M35). This differs strongly from the taut, minute execution of the Dresden Codex, also by more than one scribe (Coe and Kerr 1997:178–179). Again, the point does not concern the message, which might be perfectly serviceable. It is the vehicle of transmission that wants for disciplined regularity and able execution.

Figure 4. “Errors” and compositional irregularity in the Codex Madrid, with scribal “hands” discerned by Alfonso Lacadena García-Gallo (2000).

Book-writing involved an intimate act. Much hinges on the use of brush or quill and their steady control by the hand in artful pose, pinky aloft (David Stuart has called this the “pretty hand,” an exquisite gesture that might also be used by dancers; personal communication, 2014). Monumental carving had a different, far more muscular dynamic, and was far slower in execution. It could be ugly indeed. A carving from Chuncan on display in the Baluarte de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad Museum [Museo de la Arquitectura Maya] in Campeche shows a distended body, one outsized hand doubtless casting incense, the other holding a pouch for that offering of pellets (Fig. 5). The stone is not exceptionally well-preserved, but the glyphs sag, exhibit variant sizes—they almost certainly named the figure, but one wonders if they were ever crisply sculpted or appeared as more than suggestive shapes. Long-gone paint might have clarified some of the signs on other sculptures in the Baluarte Museum—not a few, as in a scene of a deity riding a skeletal deer, appear almost to block out glyphs yet supply no discernible detail. The one readable sign is an Ajaw below, possibly tied to a katun (20-year) ending of 9.16.0.0.0 2 Ajaw 13 Tzec, in AD 751.

Figure 5. Chuncan Stela 1, Museo Baluarte de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad [Museo de la Arquitectura Maya], Campeche (photograph by Stephen Houston). 

A later example is Calakmul Stela 50, said by its discoverers to be “rather crude” (Ruppert and Denison 1943:111). That is an understatement. The lower torso has been drastically reduced, the glyphs made surprisingly large given the size of the main figure. A face on the belt is scratched out or lightly incised, as is a pectoral. This must be one of Calakmul’s latest monuments, at the tail end of its royal line. Irregular spacing famously occurs on another late carving, Yaxchilan Lintel 10 (Graham and von Euw 1977:31). The sculptor crammed glyphs into the final passages of the text, and its overall grid of signs curved away from any neat regularity. As at Calakmul or with the Codex Madrid, the evaluative milieu had changed from earlier times. Ugly writing is not solely about execution—it is also about reception. Earlier patrons or viewers would have recoiled from Stela 50 at Calakmul; clearly, at its time of carving, patrons and viewers did not. Or, if they did, they no longer enjoyed access to the carving standards of Stela 51, a masterwork of modulated surface and light (ironically enough, this carving is reproduced on the same page as Stela 50; Ruppert and Denison 1943:pl. 50c).

Figure 6. Calakmul Stela 50 (Ruppert and Denison 1943:pl. 50b).  

Some ugly writing must have come from faltering, initial steps in training. While excavating the Acropolis at Piedras Negras, a team lead by Linton Satterthwaite uncovered masonry blocks that, on closer look, proved to have trial designs on them (Fig. 7, Satterthwaite 1965:figs. 2, 6). These would have been reused not long after their carving, hinting that monumental work did not take place in ateliers but on-site. Several scenarios suggest themselves. This might have been an opportunistic gathering of apprentices at a location where flattened stone was abundant. Or, perhaps, the training was motivated by another task nearby, the carving of wooden lintels over doorways in the Acropolis. Their wide span could only have been covered by wood, now long-gone, their decay causing most of the masonry vaults to collapse. Yaxchilan is celebrated for its sculpted lintels; Piedras Negras might have had just as many if not more, but of a material that did not last.

Miscellaneous Stone 3 shows a laborious incision of a grid—one can nearly hear the master: “start with this!” The glyphs, perhaps placed later, out-of-grid, occur in varying sizes. One sign might just be a term for “strong youth,” keleem, a suitable autograph for a young carver. Did this self-absorbed man-boy incise his own name? Miscellaneous Stone 8 labors with a grid, if a poorly aligned one. The sequence seems secure, commencing with the grid, then come the major glyph outlines, and a trial excision of recessed areas. The most finished block, at C2, experiments with suffixes that are out of proper position, the ni, wa, and AJAW topsy-turvy in relation to glyphs in other blocks. The carver might have pivoted around the stone, probing different lines of attack and alternative ways of handling a chisel or burin. The haptics of sculpting may be on display here. There were no disappointed patrons with this piece (although maybe an annoyed master), only slabs that would soon pass into the bulk of a palace.

Figure 7. Trial pieces at Piedras Negras, mid-8th century AD (Satterthwaite 1965:figs. 2, 6), both from Court 2, Acropolis (MS 3, Structure J-9; MS 8, Structure J-12). 

By any measure, the Copan Hieroglyphic Stairway, now under intensive study by Barbara Fash and David Stuart, contains glyphs of the highest quality. Those in the first-phase, bottom risers are especially accomplished (Houston, Fash, and Stuart 2014/2015:26–27). They may not have been carved by the same person—their sheer number makes that unlikely—but they do exhibit a tendency towards “homography,” a uniform style in riser after riser. By contrast, the upper stairway is highly “heterographic,” with a multitude of different hands, possibly as many as 45 (Houston, Fash, and Stuart 2014/2015:35). There is much to admire in those blocks, and one glyph that inspires a contrary emotion: a day sign, properly pedestaled, but with a singularly inept Ajaw-face (Fig. 8). Was this a trial piece by an apprentice or the results of a rushed commission? There is a perceptible disparity between the lower part of the day sign cartouche, plus the adjacent wa under the month name Tzec, and the cramped, slovenly, flat parts above. Did two different carvers operate within a single glyph block? General standards were competent-to-high at this time. The day and months signs occupy the bottom reaches of that range.

Figure 8. Day and month sign on the upper Hieroglyphic Stairway, Copan, Honduras (Gordon 1902:pl. V, F2).

Scholarship is seldom advanced by subjectivity. Yet, in all probability, for Maya writing, declines in standards are perceptible and isolable. Socially meaningful, they also reveal much about training, conduits of access, and evaluative milieux. The beholding eye can detect some of their defects: a thorough-going irregularity in glyph size or shape of grid; signs that lose their capacity to establish contrasts; in painting, a poorly controlled charge of the brush; and, when compared with other examples, an idiosyncratic variation that reduces the influence of precedent or scribal tradition. These are not the same as “pseudo-glyphs,” signs that become pictures of texts, a stylistic evocation, an ornamental place-holder with little to no content (Calvin 2006, 2013; Houston 2017). A decline in standards expresses, probably, a broader fraying in the transmission of information, a problem in society itself (Houston 2008). Ugly writing offers lessons worth studying. By their indirect example, they define achievement and rare excellence. By awkward stumbles, they help to define shifting standards and the reasons behind them.

Acknowledgements   John Baines was most helpful with an image of regrettable writing from Egypt. Karl Herbert Meyer supplied a lead about the stela from Chuncan.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.

Bush, Susan, and Hsio-yen Shih, eds. 1985. Early Chinese Texts on Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cahill, James. 1997. Approaches to Chinese Painting, Part II. In Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting,  Yang Xin, Richard M. Barnhart, Nie Chongzheng, James Cahill, Lang Shaojun, and Wu Hung, 5–12. New Haven: Yale University Press.

“calligraph, n.1”. OED Online. June 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/26430? (accessed June 16, 2018).

“calligraphy, n.”. OED Online. June 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/26437?redirectedFrom=Calligraphy&amp; (accessed June 16, 2018).

Calvin, Inga E. 2006. Between Text and Image: An Analysis of Pseudo-Glyphs on Late Classic Maya Pottery from Guatemala. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Calvin, Inga E. 2013. A Different Discourse: An Analysis of Late Classic Period Maya Pseudo-Glyphs.” Paper presented at “More than an Utterance: Indecipherable Scripts and the Materiality of Communication,” organized by Alice Yao, Chicago, Nov. 24.

Coe, Michael D., and Justin Kerr. 1997. The Art of the Maya Scribe. London: Thames & Hudson.

Dibble, Charles E., and Arthur J. O. Anderson. 1961. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book 10—The People. Santa Fe Salt Lake City: School of American Research/University of Utah Press.

Gordon, George B. 1902. The Hieroglyphic Stairway, Ruins of Copan: Report on Explorations by the Museum. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnologyy Vol. 1, no. 6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Houston, Stephen. 2008. The Small Deaths of Maya Writing. In The Disappearance of Writing Systems, eds. John Baines, John Bennett, and Stephen Houston, 231–252. London: Equinox.

Houston, Stephen D. 2016. Crafting Credit: Authorship among Classic Maya Painters and Sculptors. In Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Cathy L. Costin, 391–431. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C.

Houston, Stephen. 2017. Writing That Isn’t: Pseudo-Scripts in Comparative View. Ms. for publication in volume at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, ed. Christopher Woods.

Houston, Stephen, Barbara Fash, and David Stuart. 2014/2015. Masterful Hands: Morelli and the Maya on the Hieroglyphic Stairway, Copan, Honduras. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65/66: 15–36.

Kelley, David H. 1976. Deciphering the Maya Script. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Konstan, David. 2014. Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Graham, Ian, and Eric von Euw. 1977. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3, Part 1: Yaxchilan. Cambridge, MA; Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Lacadena García-Gallo, Alfonso. 2000. Los escribas del Códice de Madrid: Metodología paleográfica. Revista Española de Antropología Americana 30:27–85.

Liddell, Henry G., and Robert Scott. 1940. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Nehamas, Alexander. 2007. Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in the World of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ruppert, Karl, and John H. Denison, Jr. 1943. Archaeological Reconnaissance in Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Peten. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication 543. Washington, D.C.

Satterthwaite, Linton. 1965. Maya Practice Stone-Carving at Piedras Negras. Expedition Winter:9–18.

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

Beginning as puffs of air, channeled and shaped by the throat and mouth, words travel out from the body to reach other human ears. After cognitive processing, the puffs release their message, and communication ensues. [1] But words create their own problems. How is an assortment of meaningful exhalations, clicks, articulations, bellows, flutings, and affrications made more permanent and their recollection preserved beyond the memory of speakers and listeners? As many have observed, that is exactly what writing does. It takes ephemeral and invisible words and transforms them into fixed and visible graphs, to be seen as much as any picture. [2]

The ability to picture language creates its own kinds of play. Other graphic possibilities present themselves, other ways of linking with images. Other sorts of information become available. The claim that writing only concerns a phonic or linguistic message is a partial understanding at best, misleading at worst. Frolics with graphs, a luxuriation in their visible, material nature—these can be as important as any representation of sound. For Classicists, there is, as one example, a relevant scene painted by Douris in Athens, c. 490–485 BC (Fig. 1). In it, a schoolmaster holds a partly opened scroll, whose text reads: MOIΣAMOI AΦIΣKAMANΔPON EYPΩNAPXOMAI AEINΔEN. Translations of this sentence seem to vary by translator, but it concerns a Homeric appeal to a muse and a reference to a good place for singing by the fast-flowing Scamander River (Skamandros, modern Karamenderes in Turkey).

Figure 1. A schoolroom scene by the painter Douris, red-figure kylix, c. 490–485 BC, Athens, (Berlin, Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen 2285).

One theory suggests that we are looking at a bemused schoolmaster and a botched text from an “F” student: a subtle joke about dullards (Sider 2010:548). A representation (a painting by Douris of a scroll and a schoolmaster) embeds a second representation (a record of sound and meaning in an addled text). But the eye darts between the two levels. It reads the text, yet it also depicts those phrases as something physical, an inking on papyrus that opens up within a picture. In other instances, such as a vignette in an illuminated manuscript from c. AD 1450–1475, there can be a mind-bending mix: a representation of a representation of a representation (Fig. 2, Houston 2018b). An image of a northern Italian apothecary’s shop shows jars rimmed with pseudo-Hebrew or pseudo-Kufic characters, the latter a simulation—a representation—of legible writing.

Figure 2. Ibn Sina/Avicenna, Canon Medicinae, Bibliotheca Universitaria, Bologna, Italy, MS 2197, fol. 492.

Some pictured texts come close to trompe l’oeil, that clever trick by which the viewer or reader is led to confuse and blur materials (Fig. 3). In this way, a two-dimensional image triggers the perception of a three-dimensional object (Houston 2014:61, 62, 147fn.40). Miriam Milman (2009:22–23) explains how to pull off this ruse: make the object as close as possible in size to the original it replicates; blend it into surroundings; limit depth; avoid live subjects that move; and create edges that do not compromise the deception. As one case of many, a painter, perhaps Ludger tom Ring the younger (1522–1583), created an open missal (a book for saying mass) that offers a tantalizing glimpse of a gilded page (likely a Crucifixion), surrounded by columbine, insects, corn flowers, musical notation. The pages flutter slightly, about to be consulted, and a leather strap marks the first passage that is about to be read (Loeb Open Missal). There must have been some market for these ingenious deceptions, for a nearly identical painting is in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence (N. Cat. 00124048, Inv. 1890, 6191). Other than a possible signature under the music (“Ludevi rinki”) no part of the text is readable. The work itself may have been an amusing surprise that lay on a sloping stand in a bookseller’s shop (Stirling 1952:33). Glossy and expensive, it hinted at knowledge that could never be accessed.

Figure 3. The Open Missal, attributed to Ludger tom Ring the younger, c. AD 1570, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 1956.5).

A later painting, by Laurent de La Hyre (1606–1656), also displays a text as though in three-dimensional space (Fig. 4). A literate audience was the intended target, one that would recognize the figure as a liberal art (“Grammar”), watering a plant that is out-of-scene—thirsty growth stands for young minds. On its ticker tape, there reads in Latin: “a meaningful utterance which can be written down, pronounced in the proper way.” The whole was inspired by an illustrated book, Iconologia, 1603, by Cesare Ripa (Wine et al. 1993:23–25). It formed part of a larger set of seven half-length panels extolling each of the liberal arts. A bookish audience, smug its own accomplishments, would have appreciated the painting and wished to see its message multiply among the young. The letters seem to move in real space. They distort, and some of the letters disappear in part. The back of the text occurs too, the letters washed out in a brown-tinged reversal. An artful ploy simulates what the eyes might actually see in a hand-held scroll.

Figure 4. Allegory of Grammar, Laurent de La Hyre, 1650 (National Gallery of Art, London, NG6329, photograph by Stephen Houston).

The Classic Maya showed writing in the same way: as representations of representations, on physical objects in pictorial space. [3] For example, most Maya books are shown, as first suggested by Robert Sonin and amply documented by Michael Coe, in the form of leporellos or screenfolds (Coe 1973:91; Coe 1977:332–33, figs. 4–7). A few are unopened or about to be read (Fig. 5).

Figure 5. Opossum scribe (K’IN-ni ya-sa u-chu) with Maya codex and vulture accountant (k’a?-na u-su) holding single sheet with numbers, perhaps a mythic Long Count date of 6.12.4.10.9 (BAMW Photography). 

Others are folded up tidily, two pages viewable at a time (Fig. 6). A curious feature, not often noted, is that the books are being examined or painted in an impossible manner. The scribe sits perpendicular to the correct position for writing, for the folds are always vertical in a book, not horizontal as shown here. Doubtless this was for clarity of presentation. A scribe in front of a book would obscure it to the viewer.

Figure 6. Trickster rabbit-scribe, northern Guatemala/southern Campeche, c. AD 725 (K511, Princeton University Art Museum, y1975–17, photograph © Justin Kerr, used with permission).

Another feature is that, with one exception, such pictured books never disclose their contents. Viewers can readily identify a codex by its sumptuous jaguar-pelt covering and the thin, smoothed excellence of its page-edges (usually 4 to 10 visible, i.e., rather terse works by the standards of surviving examples). But they are not given any view of the glyphs within. The exception is late, a vessel from the final decades of the Classic period (a vase by the same artist may be found in the Museo Popol Vuh, Guatemala, #5335, Chinchilla Mazariegos 2005). It shows a mythic tableau of animals bringing offerings of food and drink that are presumably being tallied in an open book by two monkey scribes (Fig. 7). The deity receiving these treats may be a high god known to specialists as “God D,” but with unusual touches, for he is borne aloft by a coiled snake (on the combinatory complexity of this character, see Martin 2015:214–215, fig. 37). Unexpectedly, the book shows, at slight angle, in awkward display, some bars, cross-banded signs, and a few dots. These offer a casual hint of content, rapid flicks of ink to suggest writing, but not its detail. On present evidence, all such scenes are mythic, the participants gods or supernaturals. Not a one appears to be dynastic. Indeed, historical images are decidedly phobic about depicting books, despite the undoubted presence of many such tomes in Maya cities (a lone dynastic image may include a codex, but, oddly, it serves solely as a support for the mirror of a preening lord, K6341).

Figure 7. Monkey scribes, scene of food tribute or serving, Peten, Guatemala, c. AD 800 (K3413, photograph © Justin Kerr, used with permission).

Far more evident are glyphs on depictions of ceramics (Figs. 8, 9, 10). They appear where they should, as rim bands, but largely as pseudo-script, ovoids with thickened outlines and interior features in more delicate, thinner lines (Houston 2018b). They offer a graphic primer of what Maya scribes thought the formal attributes of writing should be.

Figure 8. Vessel with (pseudo-)glyphs, c. AD 700 (K2800, photograph ©Justin Kerr, used with permission).

The tributary scene mentioned before revels in such labels on ceramics (Fig. 9). Each animal—as a whole, they constitute a near-complete typology of Maya mammals and quadrupeds—offers up a drinking vessel with prominent glyphs on the side visible to the viewer. The lucid presentation seems not to involve legibility, however, for they appear to repeat pseudo-glyphs (a large sign with appended suffixes) that resemble the glyph for “sky,” ka’n. The scribe, a painter with a hand for inventive scenes roiling with energy, was probably someone with only a light grip on glyphic literacy. His two works demonstrate a familiarity with a few signs and their customary arrangement as suffixes and larger glyphs, but he had little understanding beyond graphic display. His writing was pure picture.

Figure 9. Animals serving food, Peten, Guatemala, c. AD 800 (K3413, photograph © Justin Kerr, used with permission).

The tenuous line between legibility and pseudo-writing is less a necessity than a strategy for other scribes, as in the fully literate Akan Suutz’, a painter of a vessel now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Fig. 10, M.2010.115.12, see also K1599). The main text on the vessel is legible, even bold and confident. This is someone who understood, as do illustrators today, the impact of the la ligne claire (Clear Line; Ligne Claire). Small vessels throughout the scene have glyphs that appear to repeat, if with the usual alternation or juxtaposition of “affixes” and larger signs. Yet there is also an expert execution of a “12 Ajaw” on a jar for pulque. That may correspond to a date of, in the Maya Long Count system, 9.17.0.0.0 (an ending for a 20-year span often commemorated with Ajaw signs written in this way, without months), or, in the Western calendar, a Julian Date of Jan. 21, AD 771.

Figure 10. Polychrome vessel from area of Tikal or even Aguateca or Dos Pilas, but likely made near Lake Peten Itza, Guatemala (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.2010.115.12, see also K1599). 

The lively scenes of marketing found in Structure Sub 1-4 at Calakmul, Mexico, offer both examples of glyphs painted on textiles (a possible u chu-?, u chuy, “sewing”?), but also, in another panel, a cup lifted to the lips of an atole drinker (Fig. 11, Carrasco Vargas and Cordeiro Baqueiro 2012:fig. 8, close-up fig. 33; Martin 2012:64–65, fig. 6). A different technique intruded here, “a minutely incised inscription” with yu-li (Martin 2012:64) that may refer to atole or maize-drink, ordinarily spelled ul, or to the act of carving or incision itself, yul-il (Houston 2016:424–425, fn9). Post-fire texts do not occur Late Classic pottery, especially in such a prominent position, but, with this enhancement, the legible text may have evoked the direct presence and action of a scribe.

Figure 11. Glyphs on blue-painted atole bowl, Structure Sub 1-4, Calakmul, Mexico (Carrasco Vargas and Cordeiro Baqueiro 2012:close-up fig. 33, photograph by Rogelio Valencia Rivera, Proyecto Arqueológico Calakmul). 

Glyphs on textiles afford an insight about gender. By common belief—the assertion is plausible yet hard to prove—most weavings were done by women (Halperin 2016:435). Yet there is also overwhelming evidence that the scribes and literate sculptors were men (Houston 2016). The occurrence of pseudo-writing on some textiles (Fig. 12, left), but legible texts on others (Fig, 12, right, Laporte and Fialko 1995:82, fig. 69), may have several explanations. If an actual textile is being shown, then this may reveal variable literacy among those painting textiles. Note that few appear to be woven into the fabric, i.e., they were added later. Or, if the painter of the pot is the relevant party, then it simply speaks to their representation of textiles.

Figure 12. Polychrome vessels with glyphs on textiles: (left) sash around waist, with pseudo-writing (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.2010.115.12, see also K1599); and (right) vase from Tikal, Burial PNT-007, with seemingly legible signs (K2697, photograph © Justin Kerr, used with permission).

The glyphs on a vessel from Tikal inspire confidence that literate productions appeared in some of these images, including a possible reference to a male youth (Fig. 13, ch’o-ko? CHAK-la-ya ‘a?).

Figure 13. Close-up of glyphs, vase from Tikal, Burial PNT-007, with seemingly legible signs (K2697, photograph © Justin Kerr, used with permission).

A conundrum for any person looking at ancient art is that divide, at times close, at times yawning, between depiction and the depicted. These are no snapshots. They express a considered view of what to show and how to show it. But the occlusions, partly visible in several images (Fig. 12, left; Figs. 13, 14, 15), along with Laurent de La Hyre’s, Allegory of Grammar (Fig. 4), reinforce a view that an ocular effect is being entertained here, that painters and carvers are displaying not what they know to be there but what they can see (Houston 2016:fig. 13.5). Occasionally, glyphs are obscured by another piece of cloth or ornament (see also a partial sculptor’s name, in the Princeton University Art Museum, #2012–78, Houston 2016:fig. 12.5, in a lead from Bryan Just). The glyphs painted at the end of Classic period in the Bonampak murals refer explicitly to “cloth” in one case (u bu ku), but to secondary painting in another (u tz’i ba-li), to the medium of transmission, line-like paint applied after weaving, and to the intended display surface. These probably operated in a setting of tributary offering (hence the T’AB-yi, “raise up,” in Fig. 14, Room 1, Caption 5c; Houston 2018a:152). Texts specified that someone painted them, that they were offered, and that the textile belonged to someone, perhaps a maker, perhaps an owner.

Figure 14. Pictured texts on textiles, Bonampak Murals (images by Stephen Houston and Gene Ware, drawing by Stephen Houston, courtesy of Bonampak Documentation Project).

This pattern has also been attested in a carving now in the Dumbarton Oaks collection,  Washington, D.C. (Fig. 15; Tokovinine 2012:69–71, fig. 32, 33). It refers to the painting on the cloth and to the ownership (or making) of that cloth, but by someone whose name disappears behind a (now-eroded) belt ornament. The statements are almost coy is providing the phrasing of possession but not any particulars about personal identity.

Figure 15. Chancala-area panel, Chiapas, Mexico, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, PC.B.537 (drawing by Alexandre Tokovinine, with added highlighting in red of text on textile).

The art historian Meyer Schapiro paid close attention to pictured text in Western art. Some of his observations are parochial, as in his categorical insistence that writing consisted of “arbitrary marks” violating the “unified whole” of a pictorial work (Schapiro 1996:119). In the Maya case, sundering imagery and writing hardly makes sense for an iconically based script. But, to useful extent, Schapiro was concerned with the “material reality of the spoken and written word” (Schapiro 1996:120) and with the problem of viewpoint. Was inserted text to be “read” by a figure within a picture, a seated Evangelist examining a Gospel oriented to his “gaze”? Or was the pertinent observer “outside,” looking at that same Gospel but now laid out for clarity, not as any real book would be? Evolutionism creeps in: for Schapiro the latter was “an archaic object-oriented attitude,” to be contrasted with “the foreshortenings and overlappings that transform the constant shapes of objects,” crafting “an image coherent to the eye with a unifying perspective” (Schapiro 1996:121, 132, 141, 181).

“Archaic,” “ordered,” “whole,” “coherent,” and “unifying” are words of prejudicial intent. Schapiro’s voting record is clear. Yet pictured writing among the Classic Maya recalls similar patterns and a roughly similar contrast of “attitude.” During a few decades in the Classic period, perhaps over a century, and in certain kingdoms or ateliers only, the need for presentational clarity gave way, in playful experiment, to what the eye could see, not what was known to be there. (Codices seemed strenuously off-limits.) This could be understood by the culturally laden term of “realism,” but it points more to a privileging of viewers, a means of summoning direct experience, and bringing observers into physical communion with acts on record. This, for the Maya, was what writing looks like.

Note 1.  “Communication” is sometimes not quite the right label. Speaking to oneself can be seen as a disorder in Western psychiatry, which orders up lithium and other drugs to control that impulse. To more recent thinking, chatter without an audience simply helps to organize the brain and to direct the tasks we perform (Kirkham et al. 2012). Moreover, in communicating with others, lip-reading offers a non-phonic option, provided that labial movement can be clearly seen (Auer 2010).

Note 2. Tactile scripts like braille and the “night writing” of Charles Barbier de la Serre present another story of sensory messaging and, as relatively recent innovations, are far more restricted in use (Weygand 2009: 39, 299).

Note 3. Left to the side here is an unusual occurrence: glyphs that appear as objects when they are most unlikely to have been seen in this way (e.g., K771, in which an “8 Ajaw” day sign “sits” on a surface, much like seated figures—all supernaturals—posed nearby). Year-bearers, numbered days marking the shift of years, also perform in this way (Stuart 2004:fig. 4).

Acknowledgments  Megan O’Neil kindly shared an image of the vessel at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

References

Auer, Edward T., Jr. 2010. Investigating Speechreading and Deafness. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology 21(3):163–168. Speechreading

Carrasco Vargas, Ramón, and María Cordeiro Baqueiro. 2012. The Murals of Chiik Nahb Structure Sub 1-4, Calakmul, Mexico. In Maya Archaeology 2, ed. Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, and Joel Skidmore, 8–59. San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press.

Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo. 2005. Cosmos and Warfare on a Classic Maya Vase. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 47:107–134.

Coe, Michael D. 1973. The Maya Scribe and His World. New York: Grolier Club.

Coe, Michael D. 1977. Supernatural Patrons of Maya Scribes and artists. In Social Process in Maya Prehistory: Essays in Honour of Sir Eric Thompson, ed. Norman Hammond, 327–47. New York: Academic Press.

Halperin, Christina T. 2016. Textile Techné: Classic Maya Translucent Cloth and the Making of Value. In Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Cathy L. Costin, 433–467. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Houston, Stephen D. 2014. The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Houston, Stephen D. 2016. Crafting Credit: Authorship among Classic Maya Painters and Sculptors. In Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Cathy L. Costin, 391–431. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Houston, Stephen D. 2018a. The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Houston, Stephen D. 2018b. Writing that Isn’t: Pseudo-Scripts in Comparative View. Unpublished ms., www.academia.edu.

Kirkham, Alexander J., Julian M. Breeze, and Paloma Marí-Beffa. 2012. 39(1):212–219. Speaking Aloud

Laporte, Juan Pedro, and Vilma Fialko. 1995. Un reencuentro con Mundo Perdido, Tikal, Guatemala. Ancient Mesoamerica 6:41–94.

Martin, Simon. 2012. Hieroglyphs from the Painted Pyramid: The Epigraphy of Chiik Nahb Structure Subt 1-4, Calakmul, Mexico. In Maya Archaeology 2, ed. Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, and Joel Skidmore, 60–81. San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press.

Martin, Simon. 2015. The Old Man of the Maya Universe: A Unitary Dimension of Ancient Maya Religion. Maya Archaeology 3, ed. Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, and Joel Skidmore, 186–227. San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press

Milman, Miriam. 2009. Does “Real” Tromp l’oeil Exist. In Art and Illusions: Masterpieces of Trompe l’oeil from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Annamaria Giusti, 21–32. Florence: Mandragora.

Schapiro, Mayer. 1996. Words, Script, and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language. New York: George Braziller.

Sider, David. 2010. Greek Verse on a Vase by Douris. Hesperia 79(4):541–554. Schoolroom

Sterling, Charles. 1952. La nature morte de l’antiquité à nos jours. Paris : P. Tisné.

Stuart, David. 2004. New Year Records in Classic Maya Inscriptions. The PARI Journal 5(2):1-6. Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, San Francisco. Stuart Yearbearers

Tokovinine, Alexandre. 2012. Carved Panel. In Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks, Joanne Pillsbury, Miriam Doutriaux, Reiko Ishihara-Brito, and Alexandre Tokovinine, 68–73. Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks, No. 4. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Weygand, Zina. 2009. The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Wine, Humphrey, Paul Ackroyd, and Aviva Burnstock. 1993. Laurent de La Hyre’s “Allegorical Figure of Grammar.” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 14:22–33. Allegorical Figure

by Stephen Houston (Brown University), David Stuart (University of Texas, Austin), and Marc Zender (Tulane University)

Among the most valued objects in a Maya court must have been bowls of an almost sugary white stone. Some are opaque, especially those from the Early Classic period. Others, of Late Classic date, consist of a thin-walled, translucent travertine (Tokovinine 2012:128–129; see also Houston 2014:258; Luke 2008). The challenge of shaping such material into drinking bowls presented difficulties across Mesoamerica (Diehl and Stroh 1978; Saville 1900). For us, the obstacle is of a different sort, that of determining the precise origin(s) of this rare stone. Banding in several examples suggests crypto-crystalline deposits from caves, possibly even manufacture of bowls in one general area (Tokovinine 2012:129)—although, if that were true, inscriptions on some bowls would confirm reworking or subsequent carving by local literates (Houston 2014:259). Seasonal oscillations in water flow and accretion resulted in the bands (Kubler 1977:5 fn1), opening the possibility of direct dating and, with further study, clues to climate change (Douglas et al. 2016; Wong and Breecker 2015).

Hieroglyphs and imagery point to the use of the travertine bowls for chocolate drinks and, in one case, from the Ethnologischen Museum, Berlin, as receptacles for alcohol poured into clysters for enemas (Grube and Gaida 2006:Abb. 3.1). Fragments occur in Classic Maya palaces, as at Aguateca Structure M7-22, the so-called “House of Masks,” and on the summits of pyramids, such as Dos Pilas Str. L5-49. Whole bowls—a rarity given the delicacy of travertine and its tendency to breakage—come mostly from tombs savaged by looters (Houston 2014:249). Years ago, in the first weeks of the first season at Caracol, Belize, Houston saw, with Arlen and Diane Chase, a travertine bowl  in a looter’s tunnel behind Structure B20 (Chase and Chase 1987:fig. 15a; see also Prager and Wagner 2013). In a tearing hurry, looters cleared out Tomb 3 of that building, leaving the bowl just days if not hours before we arrived.

An inscribed travertine bowl has just flashed briefly on the internet, the image now gone, the find spot unknown. The text, on a small bowl with sharply everted rim, contains two dates, one with a Calendar Round of 8? Eb 10 Zac, perhaps corresponding to 9.16.19.10.12 (Julian Date, August 26, AD 770), and a future event of 9.18.0.0.0, 11 Ahau 18 Mac (Julian Date, October 8, AD 790). In a final passage, it also records, for the first time, a term in Maya glyphs for “alabaster”:  [‘i]T’AB[yi] u-xi² ja-yi, ‘i-t’ab-y-i u-xix-jaay (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Glyphic passage on alabaster vessel (drawing by David Stuart). 

The passage is fully legible. The verb, based on t’ab, “rise, go up” (Stuart 1998:417), harbors an infixed ‘i particle that, in temporal terms, folds the text back to the earlier date (Houston 2012). A probable yi infix signals the intransitive, change-of-state nature of the verb as well as a conjectural marker of single-argument predicates (-i; John Robertson, personal communication, 2000). What follows is a possessive pronoun, to be expected after such a verb, then a doubled xix (cued by two dots above the xi syllable). In a separate glyph block, but clearly linked to the xix, are the syllables ja-yi, spelling a term for “thin vessel, cup,” often in reference to vessels with slightly everted rims (Hull 2016; Lacadena and Wichmann 2004:144; Martin 2012:67, figs. 16, 17). The xix must be an adjective that describes the cup.

Mayan languages offer a suite of related words for “alabaster,” including an entry, “white xix,” from the Motul Dictionary of Yucatec compiled, probably, by Antonio de Ciudad Real in the final decades of the 16th century or the beginning of the 17th (Fig. 2, Table 1). Xix accords neatly with a label for an alabaster bowl, and this is its first known attestation in glyphs. What remain to be explored are subtleties of ethnogeology. Here is a term for a milky-white, nearly glowing stone (depending on quality and direction of light), sugary to the touch, coveted by elites and royalty. Yet it might also be applied to rough, commonplace materials: pebbled, sedimentary “gravel” (gravilla, cascajo) or “round rocks” (rocas….redondeadas) redeposited from elsewhere. Some skein of thought, perhaps of stone affected by water (cave flowstone accords with that class), might bind these terms together, as shaped by an etiology of stone conceived over centuries and across languages.

Figure 2. Dictionary entry for çac xix [sak xix], ‘alabastro’  or “white xix” (Motul Dictionary, folio 94r, John Carter Brown Library, facsim. Codex Ind 8). 

Table 1. The root Xix in Greater Lowland Mayan languages.

Colonial Yucatec        <çac xix>        alabastro                        Dicc. Motul, folio 94r

Modern Yucatec        ch’áak-xìix      stalactite                        Bricker et al. 1998:79, 259

Itzaj                             xixil tunich     cascajo de piedra            Hofling with Tesucún 1994:676

Colonial Tzeltal        <xiximton>     cascajo                            Ara 1986:417 [folio 123v]

Modern Tzeltal          xixinton          rocas y gravilla redondeadas provenientes de una                                                                                             roca conglomerática previa Polian 2017:670

                                      xixim=ton       grava, cascajo                 Kaufman & Justeson 2003:441

Colonial Tzotzil          <xixibton>     pebble                         Laughlin 1988:302

Modern Tzotzil          xixibton           river pebble                Laughlin 1975:322

Note: The title is taken from a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa about Sir Harold Acton’s pleasure palace in Florence, “Blackamoors, Villa La Pietra,” 2016, Alabaster. The opulent setting seemed to fit here.

References

Ara, Fray Domingo de. 1986. Vocabulario de Lengua Tzeldal Según el Orden de Copanabastla. Edited by Mario Humberto Ruz. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Bricker, Victoria R., Eleuterio Po’ot Yah, and Ofelia Dzul de Po’ot. 1998. A Dictionary of the Maya Language as Spoken in Hocabá, Yucatán. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

Chase, Arlen F., and Diane Z. Chase. 1987. Investigations at the Classic Maya City of Caracol, Belize: 1985–1987. Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, Monograph 3. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

Diehl, Richard A., and E.G. Stroh, Jr, 1978. Tecali Vessel Manufacturing Debris at Tollan, Mexico. American Antiquity 43(1):73–79.

Douglas, Peter, Mark Brenner, and Jason Curtis. 2016. Methods and Future Directions for Paleoclimatology in the Maya Lowlands. Global and Planetary Change 138:3–24.

Grube, Nikolai, and Maria Gaida. 2006. Die Maya: Schrift und Kunst. Berlin: SMB-DuMont.

Hofling, Charles A., with Félix Fernando Tesucún. 1997. Itzaj Maya Dictionary. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Houston, Stephen D. 2014. Miscellaneous Texts. In Life and Politics at the Royal Court of Aguateca: Artifacts, Analytical Data, and Synthesis. Aguateca Archaeological Project First Phase Monograph Series, Volume 3, edited by Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, 258–269. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Hull, Kerry. 2016. An Analysis of Jaay Vessel Usage among the Ancient and Modern Maya. Unpublished ms.

Kaufman, Terrence, with John Justeson. 2003. A Preliminary Mayan Etymological Dictonary. Kaufman with Justeson

Kubler, George. 1977. Aspects of Classic Maya Rulership on Two Inscribed Vessels. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology No. 18. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University.

Lacadena, Alfonso, and Søren Wichmann. 2004. On the Representation of the Glottal Stop in Maya Writing. In The Linguistics of Maya Writing, edited by Søren Wichmann, 103–162. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Laughlin, Robert M. 1975. The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

— 1988. The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán, Volume 1, Tzotzil-English. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Luke, Christina. 2008. Carving Luxury: Late Classic Maya Stone Vase Traditions in Mesoamerica. In New Approaches to Old Stones: Recent Studies of Ground Stone Artifacts, edited by Yorke M. Rowan and Jennie R. Ebeling, 298–319. London: Equinox.

Martin, Simon. 2013. Hieroglyphs from the Painted Pyramid: The Epigraphy of Chiik Nahb Structure Sub 1-4, Calakmul, Mexico. In Maya Archaeology 2, edited Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, and Joel Skidmore, 60–80. San Francisco: Precolumbian Mesoweb Press.

Polian, Gilles. 2017. Diccionario Multidialectal del tseltal. Ms. in possession of authors.

Prager, Christian, and Elizabeth Wagner. 2013. A Possible Hieroglyphic Reference to Yax K’uk’ Mo’ at Caracol, Belize. Mexicon 35(2):31–32.

Saville, Marshall H. 1900. An Onyx Jar from Mexico in the Process of Manufacture. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 13:105-07.

Stuart, David. 1998. “The Fire Enters His House”: Architecture and Ritual in Classic Maya Texts. In Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, edited by Stephen D. Houston, 373–425. Washington, D. C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Tokovinine, Alexandre. 2012. Fluted Bowl, Fluted and Incised Bowl. In Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks, Number 4: Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, Miriam Doutriaux, Reiko Ishihara-Brito, and Alexandre Tokovinine, 120–129. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Wong, Corinne I., and Daniel O. Breecker. 2015. Advancements in the Use of Speleothems as Climate Archives. Quaternary Science Reviews 127:1–18.

by David Stuart (University of Texas at Austin)

In an earlier post on Maya Decipherment I proposed a reading KA’ or CHA’ for a long-elusive sign known as the “bent cauac” (at right). I suggested that it derived from the representation of a metate, or grinding stone, the word for which is *kaa’ in proto-Mayan and cha’ in all Ch’olan languages, including modern Ch’orti’. The occasional –a sign suffix found in a few examples, as shown here, seemed to offer good support for the identification, pointing to the presence of a glottal-stop after a in the logograph’s root, therefore Ca’. The widespread word for metate would certainly fit the bill.

I’ve come across another occurrence if the “bent cauac” that may offer confirmation of the reading, indirectly pointing to its precise logographic value as CHA’.  But the context is highly unusual, for the sign seems to operate as a syllabic sign, in clear substitution with chi in a familiar spelling of the title k’inich. This raises some larger epigraphic issues about how CV syllables and logograms of similar phonetic shape (CV’, in this case) may have sometimes blurred in function and usage, at least during a certain stage of Maya scribal history.

Figure 2. Name phrases from the vases, showing alternation of chi and ‘metate’ sign in the third block. (Photos: J. Kerr)

The substitution comes from two Late Classic vases in the “Ik’ style,” produced in the region around Lake Peten Itza in what is now northern Guatemala (Just 2012). The two vessels (K533 and K8889 in Justin’s Kerr’s database) were clearly painted by the same artist/scribe – an important point that we will return to later. A royal name, Yajawte’ K’inich, is written in the rim texts of each, referencing a local king who is depicted in the scenes below. His name is common throughout the corpus of Ik’ vessels (Tokovinine and Zender 2102:44-45). If we look closely at the extended name phrases themselves, we see obvious parallels (Figure 2). First we have u-baahil ahn(?) introducing a deity’s name, a version of the so-called “deity impersonation phrase” I have described before, found numerous other inscriptions (Houston and Stuart 1996). This serves to link a historical individual (named later) with a deity or supernatural with whom his/her identity is fused. Here it clearly names the solar deity Wuk Chapaht Tz’ikiin(??) K’inich (Ajaw), first identified in the 1980s in the inscriptions of Copan and other sites. The ruler’s name then follows, written as Yajawte’ K’inich, then the title “the captor of Ik’ Bul.” On K533 we find a fairly standard and recognizable form of the sun god’s name, with a K’INICH logogram followed by chi (see Just 2012:164). However, in the parallel sequence from K8333 the chi hand is replaced by our metate sign, making for a very strange combination. The bent cauac element, no matter what its value, plays no role in what is otherwise a very standard name for the sun god. There seems little choice but to analyze it here as a direct substitution for the syllable chi, where the metate element now takes on a syllabic role, presumably as cha (K’INICH-cha …weird!). The scribe of K8333 uses the conventional cha sign in spelling U-cha-nu, in the penultimate glyph of the illustrated phrase, perhaps as a way to highlight the playful nature of his earlier spelling,

If true, this phonetic function for the metate sign leads to a couple of interesting points.  First, it offers good evidence that the base value of the sign is indeed CHA’, not KA’. This makes sense given the presence of cha’ as “metate” throughout Ch’olan (*KA’ or *KAA’ seemed possibilities as more archaic forms, but less likely). Second and more broadly, it indicates a degree of playfulness on the part of a scribe who opted to steer clear of old, established spellings and introduce something completely outside of convention. Elsewhere the metate never appears syllabic cha, and I suspect its use as such here would have struck any ancient reader (like a modern epigrapher) as odd, even to the trained eye of a fellow Maya scribe of the period. In addition, the use of cha in spelling k’inich falls well outside the familiar rules of synharmony and disharmony, a set of conventions that was came to be tweaked anyway by the end of the Classic period. With K’INICH-cha we seem to have an example of individual scribal innovation, and a very playful one at that.

Crossovers between syllables and logograms occur throughout the history of the Maya script – BIH, “road,” can very often serve as bi, and CH’OH(OK), “rat,” is the basis for the syllable ch’o, and so on.  I believe that the painter of these vases used this familiar precedent to come up with his playful idea to use CHA’ as cha. In certain settings (calligraphic, less formal ones?) scribes may have felt a bit more freedom to draw upon these possibilities and display their creative skills as glyphic composers. For any courtly scribe the act of writing was an act of designing, often creatively and unexpectedly. In any event, all this highlights once again that the spellings found in Maya hieroglyphs were seldom truly “fixed,” as long as scribes conformed to the established rules of graphic variation. The example from the two Ik’ vases demonstrates how at least one ancient painter may have pushed some of these boundaries and conventions, and others no doubt did the same, in different ways. Epigraphic studies will always explore and refine the nature of scribal rules, but it would seem that, at least for some scribes, some leeway was possible in bridging the categories of logograms and syllables.

Figure 3. Two Ik’-style vases with parallel rim texts, K533 and K8889. (Photos: J. Kerr)

References Cited

Houston, Stephen D., and David Stuart. 1996. Of Gods Glyphs and Kings: Divinity and Rulership among the Classic Maya. Antiquity 70:289-312.

Just, Bryan R.. 2012. Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom. Princeton University Art Museum and Yale University Press.

Tokovinine, Alexander, and Marc Zender. 2012. Lords of Windy Water: The Royal Court of Motul de San Jose in Classic Maya Inscriptions. In Motul de San Jose: Politics, History and Economy in a Classic Maya Center, A.E. Foias and K.F. Emery, eds., pp. 30-66. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

For Andrew Craig Houston and Sarah Newman on their birthdays

A “lost city” evokes mystery and romance. Desirable traits include a remote location, preferably in jungle or underwater, a longstanding, rumored existence that is rich in legend, a sensational name, perhaps some lurid hint of treasure. What specialist does not cringe at “Lost City of the Monkey God,” “Z” or Paititi? (For samples of sane writing, see Grann 2010; Preston 2017.) The Maya lidar revolution, which exposes entire landscapes to view, will eventually “find” all that is now “lost” (Chase et al. 2011; Chase et al. 2014). There can be no legendary cities if lidar manages to detail each bump a meter or more in height. But a visible landscape is not the same as an interpreted one. Communities carried names and history, which can only be retrieved from glyphic evidence.

One of the objectives of Maya epigraphy is a small maneuver with great impact: lifting a city or dynasty from the “lost” category and lodging it among the “found.” Glyphic texts sometimes refer to people or places not otherwise linked to known locations. Growing knowledge tends to depopulate that category, of which several examples come to mind: a trove of unprovenanced sculptures now tied securely to La Corona, Guatemala (Stuart 2001b; see also Canuto and Barrientos 2013); and a group of carvings from El Reinado, hitherto attested on a text at Yaxchilan, lying halfway between that city and the old logging town and chicle station of La Libertad, Guatemala (Stuart 2012). There is also a smattering of cities in southeastern Campeche, all gradually being assigned to this or that ruin (Grube 2004, 2005).

Quite literally, these places lie off the beaten path, with the result that specialists need to use ingenious methods of detection. Think of Sak Tz’i’, “White Dog,” which played a strong historical role in the Usumacinta drainage in Mexico and adjacent Guatemala (Bíro 2005; Martin and Grube 2008:126, 137). “Gravity” models and other techniques of geographical science have been able to estimate its likely location from mention at known sites (Anaya Hernández et al. 2003; Bíro 2005). Yet the mot juste is “estimate.” Proof must await a text in situ, glyphs that record sak tz’i’ as part of a local royal title. Plausible arguments can identify one candidate, Plan de Ayutla, Chiapas (Martos López 2009:73–74). But, to be solved, a glyphic puzzle needs glyphic evidence. In the case of Sak Tz’i’, that is soon to come (Charles Golden and Andrew Scherer, personal communication, 2014).

A second challenge is the potential slippage between place names and royal emblems—i.e., those endowed with ajaw, “lord,” epithets, often prefixed by k’uhul, “sacred.” The Ik’ emblem, for example, almost surely relates to sites in and around the eastern portion of Lake Peten Itza in Guatemala. It does not, as previously believed, simply refer to its assumed location of Motul de San José, a substantial site northwest of the lake. In 2004, I noted the presence of its main title on Stela 1 from Tayasal/Flores, an observation made independently by others (Tokovinine and Zender 2012:fig. 2.8). Dominion or sovereignty may not only cover a single city, no matter how large or impressive. It may also apply to settlements nearby.

In the early 1990s, I began to notice, and to file away, glyphic citations of what appeared to be an unknown city in the vicinity (and, as we shall see, probably to the south) of the sprawling dynastic capital of Tikal, Guatemala. Two references occur at Tikal itself. One is in a graffito from Room 1, east wall, of Structure 5C-49-5, the second largest in this sector and a building that looks south towards the patio in front of the Mundo Perdido complex (Fig. 1, Trik and Kampen 1983:fig. 29c; see also Laporte and Fialko 1995:80–81, fig. 38, 54). According to excavations, the final phase of this structure dated to the late 600s, but caches or interments within it trended somewhat later, to the 700s (Laporte and Fialko 1995:81). Graffiti are notoriously glyph-deficient, but this is a legible exception. The text falls into single columns, an unusual arrangement suggesting some codical model or perhaps an archaizing touch (Houston 2004:286–287); this disposition is also found in caves like Naj Tunich, Guatemala (e.g., Stone 1995:figs. 7–3, 7–6 to 7–11).

Figure 1. Graffito, Tikal Structure 5C–49 (Trik and Kampen 1983:fig. 29c).

One passage—specialists need to revisit the original—contains a glyphic date. The month number is evidently one more than it should be (see MacLeod and Stone 1995:Table 2, for other instances at Naj Tunich). A plausible correction indicates one of three possibilities by the Martin-Skidmore correlation of Maya and European calendars: 9.13.5.15.4 6 K’an *7 Pax, Dec. 22, 697; 9.15.18.10.4  6 K’an *7 Pax, Dec. 10, AD 749; or 9.8.11.5.4 6 K’an *7 Pax, Nov. 27, AD 801. The closeness of the first to the winter solstice, the shortest date of the year (those thereafter getting steadily longer), gives some reassurance of its relevance. But I have qualms about the accuracy of the published drawing. The reality is that all dates work equally well, assuming, indeed, that 6 K’an *7 Pax does not allude to a more distant past.

As for the event, it is clearly a change-of-state verb, almost certainly lok’oyi, “leave” (Alfonso Lacadena, personal communication, 1998) or even, in dynastic contexts, the more allusive “go into exile,” a usage well-attested on Dos Pilas Hieroglyphic Stairway 2 (Guenter 2002). What follows appears to be ju-t’u?-AJAW, Jut’ Ajaw (Fig. 2). The ju has been understood for some time (Grube 2004:65–66, 72), and the t’u is one of my proposals based on a spelling for “rabbit,” t’u-lu, on a pot in an Australian private collection. That idea was buttressed by David Stuart’s suggested spelling of bu-t’u, “fill,” on the Palace Tablet at Palenque. This passage and its transitive verb (u-bu-tu’-wa) may report on the non-vascular embalming (“filling”) of Kan Bahlam of the city, perhaps on his day of death. The tropics would demand a rapid response to a decaying body, ranging from evisceration to packing the abdominal cavity with herbs. In Medieval Europe, where such elite practices are documented, evisceration was followed by wadding and stuffing with moistened cotton and powders of crushed aloe, rosemary, wormwood, myrrh, and marjoran (Brenner 2014; see also Weiss-Krejci 2005). Allspice (Pimenta dioica) might have served this purpose at sites like Río Azul, Guatemala (Scherer 2015:88). But what of ju-t’u itself? It matches no modern place name in the area, and the form of the word, with final, glottalized t’, is uncommon in Mayan languages. Yukateko employs hut’ to mean “narrow,” plausibly some feature of landscape (Barrera Vásquez et al. 1980:259), but I have little confidence it applies here.

Figure 2. Spellings with the t’u syllable: (a) ju-t’u?-AJAW, Tikal graffito, Str. 5C-49, Room 1, East wall (Trik and Kampen 1982:fig. 29); (b) t’u-lu, polychrome vessel, private collection, Australia (photographer unknown); and (c) u-bu-t’u-wa  (photograph by Mark Van Stone, Mesoweb link).

From the very same building comes another version of the title, but here with prefixed title and personal names. This is on an incised vase, first shown to me by Juan Pedro Laporte in 1990 and found with an adult male in a partly looted tomb from the final phase of Str. 5C-49 (Fig. 3, at top; Laporte and Fialko 1995:81, 81 fn58, fig. 68). The owner of this vessel carries the “wise one” epithet (‘itz’aat) decoded long ago by David Stuart, along with a personal name consisting of yuklaj, a positional verb for “it is shaking” (Stuart 2001a), and ch’a-ka-ta, a word rather more difficult to parse. Perhaps it transcribes some nominalization of an aggressive act of “cutting” or “chopping” (Orejel 1990), including, if I may speculate, a vowel-harmonic –V[V]t that occurs with terms like ebeet, “messenger” or “servant” (Houston 2018:104–105, for discussion of the so-called “headband bird” as a logographic version of this spelling). The incised vase, which dates by style to the eighth-century AD, reveals that this figure was in middle age. His “k’atun” notation shows him to be 40 to 60 years old.

 Figure 3. Comparison of names at Tikal and Naj Tunich, Guatemala: at top, Tikal PNTA-215, ‘i-tz’a-ti yu-ku-[la]ja ch’a-ka-ta ju-t’u-AJAW (photographs by Marc Zender); and, below, Drawing 88, yu-ku-la-ja ch’a-ka-ta ju-t’u (Stone 1995:fig. 8-88c).  

Precisely the same name, with the same title, embellishes a wall in the upper-level maze passage of the Naj Tunich cave (Fig. 3, below, Stone 1995:230, fig. 8-88c; MacLeod and Stone 1995:fig. 7-3). The “imix”-like t’u sign and its “stone” infix are clearer \than at Tikal. The text at Naj Tunich is even more informative because it forms part of a cluster of texts that, despite the angled, awkward arrangement, displays a certain cohesion of style and continuity of phrasing (Fig. 4; the painter seems to have struggled with the broken, uneven surface). A multitude of people are mentioned, each cued by the yi-ta-ji expression that indicates proximity or close participation. Several have unusual names (ni-chi-?-K’AHK’, “Flower-Fire,” tz’a-ya-ja-K’AHK’, “Watered? [doused?] Fire,” k’u-k’u i-chi-?, “Quetzal Owl?), and one of them (Tz’ayaj K’ahk’) came from the large city of Caracol, Belize (K’AN-tu-ma-ki), about 58 km north of the cave (for the tz’a-ya as a fire expression, see also Caracol Stela 22:A12 [Grube 1994:fig. 9.30]). If these passages do form a single, continuous text, then the date is likely to have been counted back from a future event (‘i-ko-jo-yi) at 9.13.0.0.0 8 Ajaw 8 Uo, March 19, AD 692, a few years before the possible assignment for the graffito at Tikal (for another ko-jo-yi, if with a ju-JUL-pi [Sacul?] lord, see Drawing 49; MacLeod and Stone 1995:fig. 7-25; also Carter 2016:239). A distance number (3 winal, 13 heew), segues backwards to a likely 9.12.19.14.7 13 Manik’ 0 K’ayab, Jan. 6, AD 692 (MacLeod and Stone 1995:table 3). This date in turn is only a little over a month after a Calendar Round on Tikal Altar 5, 9.12.19.12.9 (Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:37–38, fig. 23, table 5).

Figure 4. Drawing 88, Naj Tunich, Guatemala (Photograph by Chip and Jennifer Clark, Stone 1995:fig. 8-88). 

The name at Naj Tunich is preceded by an u-tz’i-ba, “his painting,” an indication of authorship (MacLeod and Stone 1995:176; Houston 2016:396–397, fig. 13.3). Is the painter, ni-chi-?-K’AHK’, the same as Yuklaj Ch’akat, the lord of ju-t’u? Or is there an opaque expression in between, thus recording two names? The expression resembles a statement of patronage (ya-na-bi-IL) between sculptors and their masters, but that cannot be shown decisively (Houston 2016:fig. 13.6). My suspicion is that there are two names, not one.

What is clear is that ju-t’u lords make an appearance in the middle years of the Late Classic period. The title may belong to a class of emblems clumsily designated (by me) as “Problematic Emblem Glyphs” (Houston 1986): sites with curious names and aberrant titles, but clearly royal and sovereign. In some cases they are linked to important cities. This zone has many small kingdoms but a limited epigraphic record of fairly late date (Carter 2016). With luck, ju-t’u may someday be identified on a stray monument from a mapped but unstoried ruin—not, as the fairy tale goes, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” but south of Tikal and north of Naj Tunich.

References

Anaya Hernández, Armando, Stanley P. Guenter, and Marc U. Zender. 2003. Sak Tz’i’, A Classic Maya Center: A Locational Model Based on GIS and Epigraphy. Latin American Antiquity 14(2):179–191.

Barrera Vásquez, Alfredo, Juan Ramón Bastarrachea, and William Brito Sansores. 1980. Diccionario Maya Cordemex. Ediciones Cordemex, Mérida, Yucatan.

Bíro, Pétér. 2005. Sak Tz’i’ in the Classic Period Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. Mesoweb: Bíro

Brenner, Erich. 2014. Human Body Preservation—Old and New Techniques. Journal of Anatomy 224(3): 316–344

Canuto, Marcello, and Tomás Barrientos. 2013. The Importance of La Corona. La Corona Notes 1(1). Mesoweb: Importance.

Carter, Nicholas P. 2016. These Are Our Mountains Now: Statecraft and the Foundation of a Late Classic Maya Royal Court. Ancient Mesoamerica 27(2):233–253.

Chase, Arlen F., Diane Z. Chase, Jaime J. Awe, John F. Weishampel, Gyles Iannone, Holley Moyes, Jason Yaeger, M. Kathryn Brown, Ramesh L. Shrestha, William E. Carter, and Juan Fernandez Diaz. 2014. Ancient Maya Regional Settlement and Inter-Site Analysis: The 2013 West-Central Belize LiDAR Survey. Remote Sensing 6(9):8671–8695.

Chase, Arlen F., Diane Z. Chase, John F. Weishampel, Jason B. Drake, Ramesh L. Shrestha, K. Clint Slatton, Jaime J. Awe, and William E. Carter. 2011. Airborne LiDAR, Archaeology, and the Ancient Maya Landscape at Caracol, Belize. Journal of Archaeological Science 38:387–398.

Grann, David. 2010. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Vintage, New York.

Grube, Nikolai. 1994. Epigraphic Research at Caracol, Belize. In Studies in the Archaeology of Caracol, Belize, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase, 83–122. Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute Monograph 7. Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, San Francisco.

—. 2004. Cuidades perdidas mayas. Arqueología Maya 12(67):32–37.

—. 2005. Toponyms, Emblem Glyphs, and the Political Geography of Southern Campeche. Anthropological Notebooks 11:89–102.

Guenter, Stanley P. 2002. The Inscriptions of Dos Pilas Associated with B’ajlaj Chan K’awiil. Mesoweb: Dos Pilas

Houston, Stephen D. 1986. Problematic Emblem Glyphs: Examples from Altar de Sacrificios, El Chorro, Río Azul, and Xultun. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 3. Center for Maya Research, Washington, DC.

—. 2004. Writing in Early Mesoamerica. In The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process, edited by Stephen D. Houston, 274–309. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

—. 2016. Crafting Credit: Authorship among Classic Maya Painters and Sculptors. In Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Cathy L. Costin, 391–431. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C.

—. 2018. The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Jones, Christopher, and Linton Satterthwaite. 1982. Tikal Report No. 33, Part A: The Monuments and Inscriptions of Tikal: The Carved Monuments. University Museum Monograph 44. University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Laporte, Juan Pedro, and Vilma Fialko. 1995. Un reencuentro con Mundo Perdido, Tikal, Guatemala. Ancient Mesoamerica 6:41–94.

Loten, H. Stanley. 2002. Tikal Report 23A: Miscellaneous Investigations in Central Tikal. University Museum Monograph 114. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia.

MacLeod, Barbara, and Andrea Stone. 1995. The Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of Naj Tunich. In Images from the Underworld: Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting, by Andrea Stone, 155–184. University of Texas Press, Austin.

Martin, Simon, and Nikolai Grube. 2008. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. Second ed. Thames and Hudson, London.

Martos López, Luis Alberto. 2009. The Discovery of Plan de Ayutla, Mexico. In Maya Archaeology 1, edited by Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, and Joel Skidmore, 60–75. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco. Plan de Ayutla

Orejel, Jorge. 1990. The “Axe/Comb” Glyph as Ch’ak. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 31. Center for Maya Research, Washington, D.C.

Preston, Douglas. 2017. The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story. Grand Central Publishing, New York.

Scherer, Andrew K. 2015. Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya: Rituals of Body and Soul. University of Texas Press, Austin.

Stone, Andrea. 1995. Images from the Underworld: Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting. University of Texas Press, Austin.

Stuart, David. 2001a. Earthquake! Mesoweb: Earthquake! Stuart Notes.

—. 2001b. Las ruinas de La Corona, Petén, y la identificación del “Sitio Q.” Paper presented at the XV Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, Guatemala City, Guatemala.

—. 2012. The Hieroglyphic Stairway at El Reinado, Guatemala. Mesoweb: El Reinado.

Tokovinine, Alexandre, and Marc Zender. 2012. Lords of Windy Water: The Royal Court of Motul de San José in Classic Maya Inscriptions. In Motul de San José: Politics, History, and Economy in a Classic Maya Polity, edited by Antonia E. Foias and Kitty F. Emery, 30–66. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Trik, Helen, and Michael E. Kampen. 1983. Tikal Report No. 31: The Graffiti of Tikal. University Museum Monograph 57. Univeristy Museum, Philadelphia.

Weiss-Krejci, Estella. 2005. Excarnation, Evisceration, and Exhumation in Medieval and Post-Medieval Europe. In Interacting with the Dead: Perspectives on Mortuary Archaeology for the New Millennium, edited by Gordon Rakita, Jane Buikstra, Lane Beck and Sloan Williams, 155–172. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

A new article has appeared in The PARI Journal on the recently discovered Altar 5 from La Corona, Guatemala, written by David Stuart, Marcello Canuto, Tomas Barrientos and Alejandro González. The altar is significant for being the earliest known monument from the site, and its historical reference to a previously unknown local king points to connections to nearby El Peru (Waka’) and, by extension, to the Kaanul dynasty. There is also an interesting spelling of a verb never before seen: k’o-to-yi for k’otoy, “he arrives there.”

Link to article here: A Preliminary Analysis of Altar 5 from La Corona. The PARI Journal 19(2):1-13.

La Corona, Altar 5, now on display at MUNAE, Guatemala City. (Photograph by D. Stuart)

An important new publication is out on the fabulous “Komkom Vase,” written by Christophe Helmke, Julie Hoggarth and Jaime Awe. Their excellent study provides a detailed epigraphic and historical look of this important Maya vase dating to the early ninth century. Beautifully published by Precolumbia Mesoweb Press.

Precolumbia Mesoweb Press presents A Reading of the Komkom Vase Discovered at Baking Pot, Belize, by Christophe Helmke, Julie A. Hoggarth, and Jaime J. Awe. Monograph 3. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco. Paperback, 144 pages, fully illustrated in color.

Available for purchase via www.mesoweb.com

The Komkom Vase (Photo by David Stuart)

Stephen Houston (Brown University)

In his account of the great Aztec market at Tlatelolco, Bernal Díaz del Castillo spoke of its varied merchandise. Among the wonders were gold, precious stones, rope, deer skin, wild animals, honey cake and tripe, pottery, pitch-pine, human excrement for salt and curing of skins, paper, timber, boards, metal axes, gourds, flint knives—Díaz almost grew weary of their description, “porque es para no acabar tan presto de contar por menudo todas las cosas” (Díaz del Castillo 2011:96–99). But there were also male and female slaves, many lashed to long poles across their necks. The slaves were brought and sold in such quantity as to recall, for Díaz, the Portuguese trade of Blacks in “Guinea” (Díaz del Castillo 2011:97–99). Free and enslaved people were so plentiful at Tlatelolco that they could be heard, he said, a league away.

A joint description in text and image comes Fray Diego de Durán, in a manuscript now in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (Figure 1). Probably written in his hand, albeit drawn from varying sources, this document of c. 1574–1581 drew on illustrations that were in part cut from another document and then glued on the page before relevant passages (Milne 1984:3; Robertson 1968:343). This is one of those images, as can be seen from the distinct color of its paper, slightly skewed placement, and overlap with previously written text. Puzzling out where Durán and his associates got their information is to grapple, perhaps fruitlessly, with the fusions, rejections, authorial complexity, and tumult of the era. Was the document and its kin informed by biblical history (Driggers 2020:184–185; Milne 1984:384), previous books or oral history (Milne 1984:381), pre-Columbian or early Colonial pictorials of assured skill and knowledge (Driggers 2020:189) or adorned with paintings taken from Franciscan workshops under the supervision of Bernardino de Sahagún (Milne 1984:393)? What can be assumed is that the preparation of this document was thoughtful. Mutual reinforcement took place between text and image.

The written description is, at times, focused on physical attributes. “The markets of this land were all closed (off) by large (standing) walls and facing (opposite) the temples of the gods or to one side” (Durán 1880:217, my translation). Durán also emphasized the orderly timing and specialization of markets, so that, for example, dogs could be had in Acolman, slaves in Azcapotzalco and Izocan [Itzocan] (Durán 1880:219). Slaves, some taken in war, demonstrated grace of movement by being forced to dance or sing. (One can imagine the heaviness of heart.) Others had committed crimes, fallen into debt from gambling, disobeyed parents or become so hungry from want that slavery seemed the only recourse for their families. There would be fewer mouths to feed (Durán 1880:220–222). “Collars” of wood or metal kept the slaves symbolically marked, psychologically disadvantaged, and physically manageable. Grabbing a person’s arm or leg risked injury; grabbing a neck-stick kept the slave at safe distance (Durán 1880:220). [1] These sticks go far back in time, appearing in a Late Classic stucco of captives or slaves from the Maya city of Tonina, Chiapas (Houston et al. 2006:fig. 5.13). Presumably, sticks could double as garrotes, if not to execute then to control by restricting air and blood flow to the brain.

Payment for slaves was in textile mantles, gold jewelry, and greenstone (Durán 1880:224). The denial of liberty extended to cages or wooden chambers, evidently to house slaves or those castigated by law (Durán 1880:222). Relative freedom of movement may have accorded with the kind of slave. Enemy warriors or intended sacrifices for priestly “olocaustos” (Durán’s word) were let loose at peril. They might fight or flee. A child or debtor posed less risk. Colonial sources indicate that market stalls (“a house, a post”) could be personal property (Johnson 2018:100–101). Regulating the whole were ordinances and religious orientations, the latter of special disdain to Durán (1880:215-216; for “directors” of markets, see Sahagún 1979:67–69).

Durán’s focus on slaves may account for the image. Was this some glancing allusion to the Babylonian captivity of the Old Testament, or to the benighted state of the Aztecs? By the thinking of the day, they were, after all, a “lost tribe” of Israel, Christianity their redemption (Driggers 2020:184). Or was he placing emphasis on such trade because it was in fact a dominant concern? That emphasis can be overstated in view of the stupendous inventory of trade goods at Aztec markets. At the same time, by many accounts, human trafficking was undoubtedly present. Some comments on the scene identify three buyers and six sellers (Russo 2005:73). That is unlikely. Two of the latter, a male and a female, bear wooden staves at the neck, marking their status as slaves. This would mean that all the sellers—there are four, two of higher status to judge from their mats—happen to be women. This gendering contrasts strongly with slave merchants elsewhere in the world, especially the male slavers of ancient Rome or the horrors of Price, Birch, and Co. in Alexandria, Virginia (Harris 1980:129–132; https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283193).

Durán highlights payment in mantles, gold, and greenstone. These occur throughout the scene, some in baskets. They could simply have been precious objects for sale (Driggers 2020:52). If the focus were on slaves, they might also have been payments from past transactions. The small squares resemble 1/5 tablets of gold (although their white color fails to fit that view) or, from a tablet superimposed on mantles in the Tribute Record of Tlapa, a unit of 400 textiles (Gutiérrez 2013:fig. 6.3). Perhaps the female slave is spinning for the vendor’s needs or displaying a valued skill to a buyer.

Durán (1880:215) also stressed “round stones worked as large as a round shield and in them sculpted a round figure as a figure of the sun with some paintings in the manner of roses around them with some round circles.” In Aztec writing, this corresponds to the sign for TIĀNQUIZ, “market” (Peñafiel 1895:pls. 79, 99). The buyers and sellers sit within the sign. Yet another emblem, perhaps a stone marker or altar (momoztli), appears dead center. That sign contains an inner, gold circle, a token of the sun, affirming a proposal that the celebrated Calendar Stone of the Aztecs was such an altar, albeit in Tenochtitlan rather than Tlaltelolco (Stuart 2018:214-215). In Durán’s words, it was “a figure of the sun” but ensconced within a market, its circular outline tied to both meanings.[2] A perceptive study of these carvings and their relation to markets has recognized several such “disks” in the corpus of Aztec sculpture (López Luján and Olmedo 2010).

Glyphs or stylized and condensed depictions of markets occur in several manuscripts of Colonial date (Figure 2). The sign itself has an almost flowery, jewel-like fringe and roseate glow but above all a circular outline (Mundy 1996:fig. 67). The visual overlap with the fans of merchants, pōchtēca, and the main disk in the place name of Pochtlan is probably no coincidence (Peñafiel 1895:pl. 59). Others point to a connection, common among the Aztecs, between war, trading, and similar insignia among high-ranking soldiers (López Luján and Olmedo 2010:18; a suspicion also gathers around the so-called La Ventanilla “Composite Stela” at Teotihuacan as a publicly mounted disk—of foreign merchants?—in the style of El Tajín, Veracruz [Cabrera Castro 2-17:108, fig. 14.2]). At times, the TIĀNQUIZ shows the dotted circumference of a formal “wall,” TENĀN/TENĀM (Figure 3b, c, d, e, cf. Codex Mendoza signs for the towns of Teotenanco [folio 10r] and Tenançinco [folio 10v]; Karttunen 1983:224). Some glyphs feature a confused welter of footprints, a sign of dense movement (Figure 3b, d); the “sand,” XĀL, in Xaltianquizco, may be both lexical and practical, a surface suited to shuffling feet (Figure 2b).

Echoing Durán, there is some pairing with temples, including Christian churches, or in many instances—depictions of Conquest-period Guatemala come to mind—walled precincts that contrast with cleared circular places (Figure 3c; Asselbergs 2008:figs. 24–27). As Durán notes, such areas were suitable for dance, and, in one source, lightened circles without walls denote markets: i.e., some were more formal than others (Figure 2c, Asselbergs 2008:fig. 12). The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, as in Codex Mendoza, show them pierced by roads or with routes passing nearby. A more daring idea is that the circularity was cosmic in intent, to fix markets “in the center of the universe” (Russo 2005:75). That might have been reflected in the walls and four-part entrances of an unusual, rectangular depiction of a market in the Relación Geográfica of Cempoala, Veracruz (Figure 3). The object or place in the center with scalloped edge is the target of movement, a focus within a broader precinct.

A vignette from the Codex Mendoza injects a certain pathos. Fathers instructed 6-year old boys to go to the market so that they might collect spilled maize or “beans and other miserable things that the traders left scattered” (Berdan and Anawalt 1997:120). The Codex is notorious for its austere model of parenting. Some punishments involved beating, jabbing with maguey spikes; dry chile was forced into the nostrils of immobilized children. A less literal view of the vignette is that it concerned “the disciplining of material and domestic space in order to achieve cosmic order” (Driggers 2020:119fn24). The raw nopal tuna gnawed by one child mirrors, in a symmetry of human and vegetal states, “their shared ‘rawness’ in Mexica thought” (Driggers 2020:119fn24). But I see a harsher reality. It is possible the scene reveals the depth of food insecurity in the Mexica metropolis—recall Duran’s mention of hunger and enslavement. Every bean or grain counted. Moreover, the scratching, plucking, and furtive chewing affect the archaeological study of markets. They might well have been intensively scavenged. What was dropped by vendors or buyers on the floor of the market did not necessarily stay put.

A major concern in Mesoamerican studies is how later material, or that far away, relates to other reaches of its vast sprawl. This applies to markets. After much debate, most Mayanists concede the presence of such facilities during the Classic Period (e.g., Cap 2015; Dahlin et al. 2007; King 2015; Martin 2012). As one example of many, what had seemed to be unrelated features—a proposed water-conservation measure for agriculture at Ixtutz, Guatemala—can now be reinterpreted as market stalls (Chase and Chase 1983; cf. Chase et al. 2015:230; Jacobo 1993, who detected unusual concentrations of phosphate in this zone).

In 1984, equipped with a preliminary map from Ian Graham, I did a compass survey of Dos Pilas, Guatemala, a Classic Maya city with many inscriptions. Graham was a superlative mapper, a legend with limited resources yet boundless gumption. But he had not noticed that certain low walls on his plan went over masonry. They connected as a system of concentric walls, not just in its main plaza but around the pyramid of El Duende about 1 km to the east. Theodolite mapping in 1986 for my doctoral research laid these out in far greater detail (Figure 4; Houston 1987:Maps 3, 5; reproduced in Houston 1993:Site Maps 1, 3). In my dissertation, I interpreted the small, rectangular features marked in pale red as a “squatter” settlement and the walls, here in light blue, as “defensive bulwarks” of late date; these consisted of material obviously robbed from preexisting buildings (Houston 1987:383, 386).

There was always a problem. The walls went directly over buildings, in ways that did not make any practical defensive use of the elevated palace to the south. The layout seemed instead to be planar or geometric, designed to preserve a regular concentricity, a determined circularity. Nor, being chock-a-block, did the “squatter” settlement conform to any clear pattern of contemporary communities. I also had doubts the section to the north was ever finished. The builders appear to have piled up field stone at regular intervals, a standard practice for lengths of masonry, but they failed to connect them. Excavations by Joel Palka in these deposits, as part of a wider project by Vanderbilt University, later found abundant trade goods (Fine Grey) and confirmed the density of platforms (Palka 1980; Palka et al. 1991).[3] In 1984, guards at the site had shown me pieces of jade beads recovered from the “squatter” village. They had disturbed the alignments and low walls to make it easier to cut grass in the plaza. Loose stones dulled their machetes and were thus collected and piled up at the base of trees. The small platforms were probably far more numerous in the past.

My doubts grew when, decades later, I visited the site of Pueblito, Guatemala, with my former student, Sarah Newman. In important research that has yet to be followed up, Juan Pedro Laporte and his team discovered what appeared to be market stalls and identified them as such (Laporte and Chocon 2008). During my stay, I saw and walked the same sorts of concentric walls that I knew well from Dos Pilas, but here concentrated on the monumental plaza with plain stelae; the area with stalls lay a few meters away. Market stalls seem also be present at nearby Ixtutz, Guatemala (Chase and Chase 1983; Chase et al. 2015; Jacobo 1993). The pattern of relatively late, c. 8th-9th century walls occurs at a number of sites, a few with the concentric walls that baffled me at Dos Pilas (Figure 5). As at Dos Pilas, Xuenkal, Yucatan, excludes a major construction; a wall at Cuca, also in Yucatan, climbs over a substantial platform; and there have been suggestions that the walls at Ek Balam, Yucatan—their thickness is greater than elsewhere—tend to be more symbolic than defensive (Lundy 2016:100, citing William Ringle and George Bey, the original mappers and excavators of the ruin).

A lidar survey confirms that these concentric systems are found far beyond settlements in Yucatan, appearing also in southwestern Campeche (Figure 6; Ruhl et al. 2019). The discoverers believe that these settlements, which they identify as markets, are distinct from the “hastily erected defensive walls…or more carefully constructed fortifications” of sites such as Cuca or Dos Pilas (Ruhl et al. 2018:88). But perhaps the concentric arrangements are closer than first apparent: all have a post-hoc quality, look (at least superficially) to be Late Classic or Terminal Classic in date, abut or pass over preceding construction, and selectively exclude monumental architecture. At times, the estrangement from past dynastic rituals could be acute. At Dos Pilas, as I saw from mapping in 1984 and 1986, the rupture was blunt and brutal. Walls elsewhere were more seamlessly integrated with preexisting buildings.

“Symbolic” is an expansive yet loose term. But, to come full circle (so to speak), these finds could reflect a particular moment in Classic and Terminal Classic history. Spaces and planar shapes deemed canonical—appropriate to this or that function—arose from pragmatic choices. If these were markets, a matter to be confirmed by close study on the ground, then they closed off access, protected stored goods (what vendor leaves a stall unsecured?), afforded a sense of security for economic transactions, and assisted regulation, monitoring, and even taxation. Goods moving in and out could be monitored. Nor is there reason to exclude defense, for marketing and warfare were known companions in Postclassic Mexico. But there was also a strong sense of signaling. As hinted by the TIĀNQUIZ sign, markets should, by broad understanding, be notionally circular: they are, as much as any square or rectangular plaza, a canonical space. Accordingly, a later emblem of centrality and orderly trade may have arisen from a Maya precedent in the final years of the Classic period, or at least from eastern Mesoamerica in general.[4] Links with the Aztec or speakers of Nahuatl are documented by several Maya gods that tie into central Mexican ones; reciprocally, the Dresden Codex, a Maya book, records several Mexican deities (Taube and Bade 1991; Whittaker 1986).

Possibly, the walls also kept people in. This is the most speculative and disquieting part of the argument: some of these facilities may have been pens, the corrals of people. The degree to which the Classic Maya slaved is unclear. The non-locals (11–16%) found by chemical studies of bone at Tikal—the samples are not large, however—could reflect this practice (Wright 2012). Aztec neck-sticks are almost copies of those on the much-afflicted, Late Classic captives at Tonina (see above). Pietro Martire d’Anghiera mentions that a native canoe encountered by Columbus was “drawn by naked slaves with ropes around their necks,” and Diego de Landa leaves no doubts about the abundance of slaving, often to trade for cacao, and attributed “this evil” to a particular group, the Cocom, i.e., he historicized it, fixed it as a development in time (Tozzer 1941:36, 36fn175, 94). For the Classic Maya, Mary Miller notes many ceramic figurines, including finely dressed women, with what appear to be slave-ropes around their necks (personal communication, 2019).

Was this, as Andrew Scherer suggests to me, the darker side of the Terminal Classic? Dynasties might raid, but they could also shield. Their unraveling, the evident movements of people, and the new ethnic presences documented by Simon Martin (2020:290–294, 296–297, fig. 73) led potentially to vigorous profit and a frayed social contract. This might have been especially the case for the “internationalization” of slaving, a trade highlighted by early Colonial sources. In Africa, according to a chilling appraisal by two economic historians, the “marginal value of people as captives [rose] above their marginal value as producers to be taxed…[with an] incentive to produce ‘outsiders’ who can be raided” (Whatley and Gillizeau 2010:573). For the Yoruba in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, war yielded slaves, slaving drove war, with no small capital outlay required to mount campaigns and to house slaves in enclosures known as ita (Ojo 2008:80–81). Brokers, chiefs, warriors—all profited from human misery. For a time, and perhaps among the Terminal Classic Maya, fluid trade could coexist with fragmenting societies.

[1] The term for “slave” in Nahuatl (TLĀCOH-TLI) is a near-homophone for “staff, pole” (TLACŌ-TL, David Stuart, personal communication, 2020; see Karttunen 1983:256). This may have been a metonym, an object standing for (and even depersonalizing) its referent or perhaps, because of the divergent vowels, the association was fortuitous.

[2] Durán refers to another altar that has yet to be discovered by urban excavation (Stuart 2018:23). The distant analogy of Maya altars suggests a logical dyad, the moon. Altars or ballcourt markers with moon deities include Caracol Altar 25, Tenam Rosario Altar 1, and Quirigua Altar Q.

[3] The broader mesh of trade in the region has since been emphasized to the south, in and around the upper and middle reaches of the Pasión River, Guatemala (Kovacevich 2006; Demarest et al. 2014).

[4] The operative concept is probably the pan-Mayan word pet, “circular” or “round” (Kaufman and Norman 1984:128). To my knowledge, the glyphic version of this, a circle within a circle, was first deciphered by Nikolai Grube. The graphic origin is doubtless that of a hard stone ear spool, an object of great value and patient manufacture. The sign is employed as a verb to indicate the creation of some rounded thing and, less literally, as the completion of a carving. See K1180, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (#1988.1182), in which a monkey-scribe holds up a rounded object near a verb PET-ta-ja, pehtaj, “it is rounded” (photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr). The insertion of the hand and rounded object into the vertical, glyphic passage is probably a self-conscious integration of text with image.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Charles Golden, Takeshi Inomata, Simon Martin, Mary Miller, Joel Palka, Andrew Scherer, David Stuart, and Karl Taube for useful discussion, and to Oswaldo Chinchilla and Nicholas Dunning for help with figures. Sarah Newman defrayed the costs of our productive visit to Pueblito and was, as ever, full of insight and energy. For Nahuatl words, including those spelling in hieroglyphs, I use the spellings with vowel length in the authoritative dictionary by Karttunen (1983). The online dictionary edited by Stephanie Wood is also a wide-ranging tool for scholars (https://nahuatl.uoregon.edu/content/welcome-nahuatl-dictionary).

References

Asselbergs, Florine. 2002. La conquista de Guatemala: Nuevas perspectivas del Lienzo de Quauhquecholan den Puebla, México. Mesoamérica 44:1–53.

——. 2008. Conquered Conquistadors: The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, A Nahua Vision of the Conquest of Guatemala. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Berdan, Frances F., and Patricia R. Anawalt. 1997. The Essential Codex Mendoza. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cabrera Castro, Rubén. 2017. La Ventilla and the Plaza of the Glyphs. In Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire, edited by Matthew H. Robb, pp. 108–117. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—de Young / Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cap, Bernadette. 2015. Classic Maya Economies: Identification of Marketplace at Buenavista del Cayo, Belize. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Carrasco Vargas, Rámon, Verónica A. López, and Simon Martin. 2009. Daily Life of the Ancient Maya Recorded on Murals at Calakmul, Mexico. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106(46):19245–19249. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0904374106.

Chase, Arlen F., and Diane Z. Chase. 1983. Intensive Gardening Among the Late Classic Maya: A Possible Example at Ixtutz, Guatemala. Expedition Spring:2–11.

——, ——, Richard Terry, Jacob M. Horlacher, and Adrian S.Z. Chase. 2015 Markets Among the Ancient Maya: The Case of Caracol, Belize. In The Ancient Maya Marketplace: The Archaeology of Transient Space, edited by Eleanor King, pp. 226-250, Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Dahlin, Bruce H., Christopher T. Jensen, Richard E. Terry, David R. Wright, and Timothy Beach. 2007. In Search of an Ancient Maya Market. Latin American Antiquity 18(4):363-384. doi:10.2307/25478193.

Demarest, Arthur A., Chloé Andrieu, Paola Torres, Mélanie Forné, Tomás Barrientos, and Marc Wolf. 2014. Economy, Exchange, and Power: New Evidence from the Late Evidence from the Late Classic Maya Port City of Cancuen. Ancient Mesoamerica 25(1):187–219.

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. 2011. Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, edited by Guillermo Serés. Madrid: Real Academia Española – Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg-Círculo de Lectores. https://www.rae.es/sites/default/files/Aparato_de_variantes_Historia_verdadera_de_la_conquista_de_la_Nueva_Espana.pdf.

Driggers, Kristopher T. 2020. The History of Idolatry and the Codex Durán Paintings. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago.

Durán, Diego de. 1579. Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e islas de la tierra firme [manuscript]. Vitr/26/11, Biblioteca Nacional de España. http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000169486&page=1.

——. 1880. Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y islas de Tierra Firme, Tomo II. Mexico City: Ignacio Escalante. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924020376350.

Gutiérrez, Gerardo. 2013. Negotiating Tributary Demands in the Tribute Record of Tlapa. In Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Kenneth G. Hirth and Joanne Pillsbury, pp. 141–167. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Harris, William V. 1980. Towards a Study of the Roman Slave Trade. Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 36:117-140. doi:10.2307/4238700.

Houck, Charles W., Jr. 2004. The Rural Survey of Ek Balam, Yucatán, Mexico. Ph.D. dissertation, Tulane University.

Houston, Stephen D. 1987. The Inscriptions and Monumental Art of Dos Pilas, Guatemala: A Study of Classic Maya History and Politics. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University.

——. 1993. Hieroglyphs and History at Dos Pilas: Dynastic Politics of the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.

——, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. 2006. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Jacobo, Álvaro L. 1993. Aplicación de técnicas de prospección química de suelos en Ixtutz, Petén. In VI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 1992, edited by Juan Pedro Laporte, Héctor Escobedo, and Sandra Villagrán de Brady, pp.250-261. Guatemala City: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología. 

Johnson, Benjamin D. 2018. Transcripción de los documentos Nahuas de Tezcoco en los Papeles de la Embajada Americana resguardados en el Archivo Histórico de la Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia de México. In Documentos nahuas de Tezcoco, Vol. 1, edited by Javier Eduardo Ramírez López, pp. 100–101. Texcoco: Diócesis de Texcoco.

Karttunen, Frances. 1983. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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

King, Eleanor, ed. 2015. The Ancient Maya Marketplace: The Archaeology of Transient Space. 2nd edition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Kovacevich, Brigitte. 2006. Reconstructing Classic Maya Economic Systems:
Production and Exchange at Cancuen. Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University.

Laporte, J. P. and J. E. Chocon. 2008. Será un Palacio? … No! Será Una Acropolis? … No!: Un conjunto de función desconcertante en el Centro de Pueblito, Peten. In Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2007, edited by Juan Pedro La Porte, Bárbara Arroyo, and Héctor E. Mejía, pp. 696–712. Guatemala: Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnologia.

López Luján, Leonardo, and Bertina Olmedo. 2010. Los monolitos del mercado y el glifo tianquiztli. Arqueología Mexicana 101:18–21. http://cisadu2.let.uniroma1.it/archeo/America/Lopez.pdf.

Lundy, Heather D. 2016. Architecture and Placemaking at a Northern Maya City: Ek’ Balam and the Question of Style. Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University.

Manahan, T. Kam, Traci Ardren, and Alejandra Alonso Olvera. 2012. Household Organization and the Dynamics of State Expansion: The Late Classic-Terminal Classic Transformation at Xuenkal, Yucatan, Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 23(2):345–364.

Martin, Simon. 2012. Hieroglyphs from the Painted Pyramid:
The Epigraphy of Chiik Nahb Structure Sub 1-4, Calakmul, Mexico. In Maya Archaeology 2, edited by Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, and Joel Skidmore, pp. 60–81. San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press.

——. 2020. Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Milne, Michael G. 1984. Diego Durán: Historia de las Indias de Nueva España. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.

Mundy, Barbara E. 1996. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ojo, Olatunji. 2008. The Organization of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Yorubaland, ca.1777 to ca.1856. The International Journal of African Historical Studies 41(1):77-100.

Palka, Joel, and Antonia Foias. 1991. Operación DP2: Excavaciones en al plaza mayor de Dos Pilas. In Proyecto Arqueológico Regional Petexbatun, Informe Preliminar #3, Tercera Temporada 1991, Tomo 1, edited by Athur A. Demarest, Takeshi Inomata, Héctor Escobedo, and Joel Palka, pp. 12–36. Report submitted to the Instituto de Antropología e Historia, Guatemala.

——, ——, and Karl Taube. 1989. Excavaciones en la plaza central de Dos Pilas. In El Proyecto Arqueológico Regional Petexbatun, Informe Preliminar #1, edited by Arthur A. Demarest and Stephen D. Houston, pp. 62–129. Report submitted to the Instituto de Antropología e Historia, Guatemala.

Peñafiel, Antonio. 1895. Nomenclatura geográfica de México: Atlas. Mexico City: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaria de Fomento.

Robertson, Donald. 1968. Paste-over Illustration in the Durán Codex of Madrid. Tlalocan 5:340–348.

Ruhl, Thomas, Nicholas P. Dunning, and Christopher Carr. 2018. Lidar Reveals Possible Network of Ancient Maya Marketplaces in Southwestern Campeche, Mexico. Mexicon 40:83–91.

Russo, Alessandra. 2005. El realismo circular: Tierras, espacios y paisajes de la cartografía novohispana, siglos xvi y xvii. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. 1979. Florentine Codex, General History of the Things of New Spain, Book 8: Kings and Lords, translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Monographs of the School of American Research, no. 14, part IX. Santa Fe: School of American Research / Salt Lake City: University of Utah.

Stuart, David. 2018. El emperador y el cosmos: Nueva Mirada a la Piedra del Sol. Arqueología Mexicana 149:20–25.

Taube, Karl, and Bonnie Bade. 1991. An Appearance of Xiuhtecuhtli in the Dresden Venus Pages. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 35. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

Tozzer, Alfred M. 1941. Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatan. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 18. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University.

Webster, David. 1978. Three Walled Sites of the Northern Maya Lowlands. Journal of Field Archaeology 5(4):375–390.

Whatley, Warren, and Rob Gillezeau. 2011. The Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on Ethnic Stratification in Africa. The American Economic Review 101(3):571–576.

Whittaker, Gordon. 1986. The Mexican Names of Three Venus Gods in the Dresden Codex. Mexicon 8(3):56–60.

Wright, Lori E. 2012. Immigration to Tikal, Guatemala: Evidence from Stable Strontium and Oxygen Isotopes. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 31:334–352.

Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period, 150-900 CE by Simon Martin. From Cambridge University Press, 2020.

2020 has seen the arrival of an important new book by Simon Martin, a frequent contributor to Maya Decipherment. It’s no exaggeration to say that Ancient Maya Politics is a pivotal work, crucial for both archaeology and epigraphy. A must-read and re-read for students, scholars, and anyone keenly interested in how we access and interpret the political world of the ancient Maya.

From Cambridge University Press:

The Classic Maya have long presented scholars with vexing problems. One of the longest running and most contested of these, and the source of deeply polarized interpretations, has been their political organization. Using recently deciphered inscriptions and fresh archaeological finds, Simon Martin argues that this particular debate can be laid to rest. He offers a comprehensive re-analysis of the issue in an effort to answer a simple question: how did a multitude of small kingdoms survive for some six hundred years without being subsumed within larger states or empires? Using previously unexploited comparative and theoretical approaches, Martin suggests mechanisms that maintained a ‘dynamic equilibrium’ within a system best understood not as an array of individual polities but an interactive whole. With its rebirth as text-backed historical archaeology, Maya studies has entered a new phase, one capable of building a political anthropology as robust as any other we have for the ancient world.

The Adorned Body: Mapping Maya Dress, edited by Nicholas Carter, Stephen D. Houston, and Franco D. Rossi. From the University of Texas Press, 2020.

A new volume—a project arising from a seminar at Brown University—is just out. It offers a comprehensive review of the meaning, layers, and intersections of Maya clothing over time…and should be of keen interest to readers of this blog.

From the University of Texas Press:

How we dress our bodies—through clothing, footwear, headgear, jewelry, haircuts, and more—is key to the expression of status and identity. This idea was as true for ancient Maya civilization as it is today, yet few studies have centered on what ancient Maya peoples wore and why. In The Adorned Body, Nicholas Carter, Stephen Houston, and Franco Rossi bring together contributions from a wide range of scholars, leading to the first in-depth study of Maya dress in pre-Columbian times.

Incorporating artistic, hieroglyphic, and archaeological sources, this book explores the clothing and ornaments of ancient Maya peoples, systematically examining who wore what, deducing the varied purposes and meanings of dress items and larger ensembles, and determining the methods and materials with which such items were created. Each essay investigates a category of dress—including headgear, pendants and necklaces, body painting, footwear, and facial ornaments—and considers the variations within each of these categories, as well as popular styles and trends through time. The final chapters reveal broader views and comparisons about costume ensembles and their social roles. Shedding new light on the art and archaeology of the ancient Americas, The Adorned Body offers a thorough map of Maya dress that will be of interest to scholars and fashion enthusiasts alike.

Stephen Houston (Brown University) and Sarah Newman (University of Chicago)

The elephant arrived in July 802. [1] Captured in Africa, or perhaps offered by a raja in India, the creature had come first to the Abbasid Caliph, Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 786–809 [Dutton 2004:59–61; Scholz, with Rogers 1972:82]). From there, carried by an imperial fleet and then slogging by foot over the Alps, the elephant walked, we presume, all the way to Aachen, into the court and presence of the Emperor Charlemagne. For the Caliph, the animal was a diplomatic gift, along with rich textiles and other goods (Brubaker 2004:176). For Charlemagne, the pachyderm was a specific request. (Its name: Abul Abaz [Abū ‘l-ʿAbbās?], of uncertain meaning but possibly “the Father of Frowns” or “Wrinkles.”) The elephant was clearly meant to impress on many levels, but perhaps above all as a link between the orient and a ruler intent on forging ties to that region. According to an Irish monk, “everyone in the Kingdom of the Franks” saw him (Dutton 2004:62). Abul Abaz was to die eight years later in a war expedition along the banks of the Rhine (Dutton 2004:189–190; Scholz, with Rogers 1972:92). One can imagine the regret, for a replacement would be hard to find.

Abul Abaz was a creature of dislocation. He was out-of-place, singular if symbolic in import, nonpareil like the Emperor, and brought with great and obvious effort from his natural setting. For centuries, stories were told about him. At Aachen and elsewhere, imperial menageries were also known (Davis 2015:327), and the assembly of exotic and unexpected beasts must have reflected and buttressed Charlemagne’s narrative of global dominion. But what resonates here is that the elephant had a name, a suggestion of steady, even compliant personality—being led hither and yon hints as much. People cared about him. He meant something as a symbol but also as the one and only Abul Abaz. Large, imposing, and awesome, he would prefigure another elephant, Jumbo, the show-spectacle of P. T. Barnum. Jumbo would become, after his accidental death in 1885, a byword for very large things (Chambers 2008:207–208).

Although a distant analogy, Abul Abaz bears on the Classic Maya and Mesoamerica. The Florentine Codex, which reveals Aztec practice, tells of houses where exotic animals were kept. In a “house of birds” (tо̄tocalli), “eagles, red spoonbills, trupials [Icterus sp.], yellow parrots” could be found (although evidence is scarce, stone circles have also been interpreted as pens for captive birds at Maya sites [Hamblin 1984: 93]). As Bernardino de Sahagún explains in a marginal gloss, a casa de las fieras, a “house of wild beasts,” was filled with “ocelots, bears, mountain lions, and mountain cats” (Sahagún 1979:45, fn15; Figure 1). The description is curiously lumping of humans and animals, yet it also attentive to precious objects and fine skill. Animals are gathered with slaves and captives and situated near workshops where precious goods were produced. All were closely controlled and of high value. Sahagún’s reports echo other Spanish accounts in terms of the variety of birds and beasts, though first-hand observers like Bernal Díaz del Castillo also recalled “the infernal noise when the lions and tigers roared and the jackals and foxes howled and the serpents hissed, it was horrible to listen to and it seemed like a hell” (Díaz del Castillo 2000:145).

Where was this menagerie? The Nuremberg Map of 1524, a woodcut prepared to accompany a Latin version of Hernán Cortés’ second letter to the Emperor Charles V, provides the best clue. The map was almost certainly based on an indigenous document, if shaped by Cortés’ self-presentation and as further embellished by European buildings, Latin letters (with abbreviations to accommodate the cramped space on the map), and a waving Imperial banner (e.g., Boone 2011:31–35; Mundy 1998:25). There are confusions in orientation. West is plainly to the top, yet the larger, almost portolan-map of the Caribbean (not of indigenous origin) should logically be to the bottom; it is not, perhaps because the particular page trim of the woodcut would provide no space for it. The central precinct has remarkable details, many shown to reflect actual buildings or even equinoctial alignments (Aveni and Gibbs 1976; Boone 2011:35). But it too has the Templo Mayor at the top, facing east, precisely the opposite of its true orientation. Doubtless this had to do with enhancing the centrality and graphic visibility of the Templo Mayor: page-center, temple summit to the top of the map.

Of interest here is the placement of the Dom[us] a[n]i[m]aliu[m], “House of the Animals” (Figure 2). If situated with respect to the central precinct, it would have been off the northwestern corner of the temple precinct; if with respect to the overall map, off the southeastern. Nearby, at a diagonal, was the Dom[us] D. Muteezuma, “House of Don Moteuczoma.” According to excavations in the La calle de Moneda, the “New Houses of Moteuczoma” lay to the southeast of the Templo Mayor, implying a (more-or-less) correct orientation in relation to the overall, regional map. If accurate, this would place the “House of the Animals” in the same general area, more to the north, yet closer to the Templo Mayor. Andrés de Tapia and Pedro Mártir de Anglería also located the “House of the Animals” close to, and even within, the palace of Moteuczoma, specifying, somewhat implausibly, a group of 600 people in service to the animals alone (for an excellent compilation of descriptions, see Blanco et al. 2009:29-32; those authors put the House in what is now the Convent of San Francisco, Madero Street, Blanco et al. 2009:34–35). [2] Only excavations will establish the actual location.

Whether to call this “House” a “zoo” threads through scholarship (Nicholson 1955). There is certainly some sort of ordering in the visual sources. The Nuremberg woodcut assigns each animal to an individual cell or cage, jaguars tend to pair with puma, and birds dominate as might be expected from tо̄tocalli, a “House of Birds.” The two darker figures may be animals, but could also be gendered captives or allusions to the keepers described in various sources. There seems little doubt that the animals were not only for general viewing or diversion, hence the disquiet with the term “zoo” (Blanco et al. 2009:35–36). But a life of pleasure and leisure did form part of the imperial and elite experience. What appears equally undeniable is that the animals thus gathered served ritual purposes too, as well-tended, (mostly) inedible, cosmically arranged sacrifices for the Templo Mayor or, earlier still, in Teotihuacan (Blanco et al. 2009:36; López Luján et al. 2014:35–36). The evidence from Teotihuacan is notable for its isotopic assays of such animals, suggesting that many were tended for some time in captivity, including “felids [that were] fed a mixed diet of maize-raised lagomorphs [rabbits or hare] supplemented with dog and/or human meat” (Sugiyama et al. 2015:10), as well as for the remains (only by impression) of wooden cages (Sugiyama and López Lujan 2007:130, Figure 4).

The wild and wildly out-of-place—a jaguar in the midst of an imperial capital, but also bears, wolves, and diverse other creatures—raise an intriguing parallel with two pieces of evidence from the Classic Maya. The first consists of a set of peccary teeth uncovered at the island of Jaina, Campeche, Mexico (Figure 3; INAH Mediateca, #82–20140130-123000:7553). There is no certainty absent direct physical examination, and ancient carving and shaping can eliminate diagnostic features. But the top tooth appears to be a maxillary canine from the right side (note the cross-section shape of the junction where the root meets the enamel and the groove running along the lingual surface of the root). The second and fourth in the image are probable mandibular canines. Each has a small facet or flattening at the tip of the enamel, and the root is more slender than the maxillary canine just below the point where the enamel and root join. A credible case thus exists that these come from one peccary, not four—a complete set. In a unique touch, the very peccary from which these came may be depicted on each of the teeth. In spirited self-reference, the images emphasize the canines on a canine. Each tooth has been drilled for suspension, twice in two instances, presumably as part of a single necklace (excavation data are lacking) or, as Karl Taube suggests (personal communication, 2021), to carver’s gouges on twin-bladed instruments used for sculpting; this second proposal would need scrutiny of wear, and the alternation of single and double perforations hints at some other, joint arrangement of the canines. The sense projected here is less of generic peccaries than one in particular, lying on its stomach. Was this a trophy from the hunt or was it some other, more sentimental set of tokens? That peccaries were kept and even bred by the Classic Maya is a possibility that has been raised in the past (e.g., Dillon 1988), especially if the young were removed at young age from their mothers (Sowls 1984:105–106). Indeed, peccaries may become so tractable as to be, in the words of an anonymous author, “domesticated with more facility than the wild hog” and “troublesome from [their] familiarity” (Sowls 1984:105). The intimacy of these images and their placement on a prominent item of dress hints at an emotional tie, though whether with prey or a pet remains unclear.

The second piece of evidence is unprovenanced, but the glyphic text leaves little doubt about where it came from: the dynastic capital of Naranjo, Guatemala. The text reads: u-ba ke-le BAHLAM-ma AJ–TOOK’-TI’ SAK-CHUWEEN-na K’UHUL-?sa-?-AJAW, u ba[a]kel bahlam Aj Took’ Ti’, Sak Chuween, K’uhul ?sa-? Ajaw, “it is the jaguar bone of He-of-Warlike Speech (Houston 2016), White Monkey, Holy Lord of Naranjo.” Ruling from AD 755 until about 784, this king usually went by another name, K’ahk’ Ukalaw Chan Chahk, a relatively common practice in certain places such as Naranjo and as far north as Ek’ Balam. The fact that other objects with his name have appeared on the art market suggests that his tomb was opened by looters some decades ago. The title on the bone may be youthful moniker or perhaps a title of martial, angry demeanor (Houston 2016; see also Martin and Grube 2008:80-81). The use of the -el suffix confirms, at least linguistically, that this is the bone of a jaguar (Houston et al. 2001:30–32, Figure 14) [3] As for the bone itself, it is securely identifiable as a felid fibula from the right side (the proximal end present, the distal end cut off), and from a juvenile, with evidence that the bone was still fusing. The size is compatible with a larger cat, yet distinguishing between feline species is notoriously difficult (Sugiyama et al. 2019:416). The cutting and reshaping of this bone means that only DNA tests will be able to distinguish whether it is a jaguar (Panthera onca) or mountain lion (Puma concolor). The explicit text predicts what that result will be.

The origins of the peccary’s teeth or the (probable) jaguar’s bone will be difficult to resolve. Many scenarios come to mind: trophies, trade items, extraction from a decaying animal found in the forest. But there may be self-referential images and glyphic tags on creatures known to—and perhaps esteemed personally by—the high-status owners of these faunal remains. Such animals might have been rarities, as curious as the occupants of Moteuczoma’s menagerie or Charlemagne’s elephant. But evidence grows for them nonetheless. To judge from its isotopic signature, a Late Classic peccary from Ceibal, Guatemala, may have been raised in captivity with a diet of maize or other δ13^C plant; the same possibly obtained for a large feline at the site (Sharpe et al. 2019:3–4). At Copan, too, isotopic analysis reveals exotic animals (including jaguars and pumas) kept in captivity and transported across long distances (Sugiyama et al. 2018). These creatures were out-of-place, singular, remarkable, and memorable, in ways accentuated, as in the cases here, by minute portraits in bone or an expert text incised for a king.

Notes

[1] For other entries in the “Maya Creatures” series, see Maya Musk, Dragons, Mosquitoes, Dogs, and Fox.

[2] Similar confusions of orientation occur in the Santa Cruz Map of 1555, now in the Uppsala University Library. It shows the precursor of the current cathedral facing east when it should be looking south. The Santa Cruz map does display, in a position close to La calle de Moneda, a cluster of buildings with the distinct frieze of jewel-like circles linked to royal residences and, by extension, to the Toltecs. In this case, at Tenochtitlan, it would have been a huēyi tēcpan, a “Great Palace,” because of the number and complexity of its buildings. For such a frieze at Tula itself, if equipped with Doric columns, arches, and ashlar masonry, see the Florentine Codex, Book 8, fol. 11r. The Mixtec Codex Colombino (fol. 13) likewise displays ascension rites (nose-piercings) at a building with such features, the so-called Frieze of Rushes. In the Santa Cruz Map isolated palaces of provincial lords contrast with the two stories, multiple windows, and grouped structures shown for palaces in epicentral Tenochtitlan.

[3] There is a parallel spelling for a human bone (Ek’ Balam Miscellaneous Text 7) that identifies its human donor, a subordinate lord or perhaps a captive (Lacadena García-Gallo 2004:79–83, fig. 29). Andrew Scherer (n.d.) notes the same for the celebrated peccary skull from Copan, Honduras, itself depicting peccaries.

Acknowledgements

Andrew Scherer provided useful comments and a citation. As usual, Justin Kerr was most generous with his photographs, as was Dicey Taylor in assisting him.

References

Aveni, Anthony F., and Sharon L. Gibbs. 1976. On the Orientation of Precolumbian Buildings in Central Mexico. American Antiquity 41:510–517.

Blanco, Alicia, Gilberto Pérez, Bernardo Rodríguez, Nawa Sugiyama, Fabiola Torres, and Raúl Valadez. 2009. El zoológico de Moctezuma ¿Mito o realidad? AMMVEPE 20(2):28–39.

Boone, Elizabeth H. 2011. This New World Now Revealed: Hernán Cortés and the Presentation of Mexico to Europe. Word & Image 27(1):31–46.

Brubaker, Leslie. 2004. The Elephant and the Ark: Cultural and Material Interchange across the Mediterranean in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58:175–195. doi:10.2307/3591385

Davis, Jennifer R. 2015. Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. 2000. Bernal Díaz, from The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. In Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico, edited by Stuart B. Schwartz, pp. 133-155. Boston: Palgrave MacMillan.

Dillon, Brian D. 1988. Meatless Maya? Ethnoarchaeological Implications for Ancient Subsistence. Journal of New World Archaeology 7:59–70.

Dutton, Paul E. 2004. Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Hamblin, Nancy L. 1984. Animal Use by the Cozumel Maya. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Houston, Stephen. 2016. Tough Talk and Maya Kings. Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Ancient Maya Writing and Iconography.

——, John Robertson, and David Stuart. 2001. Quality and Quantity in Glyphic Nouns and Adjectives. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 47. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

Lacadena García-Gallo, Alfonso. 2004. The Glyphic Corpus from Ek’ Balam, Yucatán, México. Report to FAMSI.

López Luján, Leonardo, Ximena Chávez Balderas, Belem Zúñiga-Arellano, Alejandra Aguirre Molina, and Norma Valentín Maldonado. 2014. Entering the Underworld: Animal Offerings at the Foot of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. In Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World, edited by Benjamin S. Arbuckle and Sue Ann McCarty, pp. 33–61. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Martin, Simon, and Nikolai Grube. 2008. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. Second ed. London: Thames and Hudson.

Mundy, Barbara E. 1998. Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, its Sources and
Meanings. Imago Mundi 50:11–33.

Nicholson, Henry B. 1955. Montezuma’s Zoo. Pacific Discovery 8(4):3–11.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. 1979. Florentine Codex, General History of the Things of New Spain: Book 8—Kings and Lords, translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Monographs of The School of American Research 14(IX). Santa Fe: The School of American Research/Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Scherer, Andrew. n.d. The Death Within: Maya Perspectives on Bone, Material, and Being. Manuscript in possession of authors.

Scholz, Bernard W., with Barbara Rogers. 1972. Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Sharpe, Ashley E., Kitty F. Emery, Takeshi Inomata, Daniela Triadan, George D. Kamenov, and John Krigbaum. 2018. Earliest Isotopic Evidence in the Maya Region for Animal Management and Long-Distance Trade at the site of Ceibal, Guatemala. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (14):3605–3610. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1713880115

Sowls, Lyle K. 1984. The Peccaries. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Sugiyama, Nawa, William L. Fash, and Christine A.M. France. 2018. Jaguar and Puma Captivity and Trade among the Maya: Stable Isotope Data from Copan, Honduras. PLoS ONE 13 (9): e0202958. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202958

——, ——, and ——. 2019. Creating the Cosmos, Reifying Power: A Zooarchaeological Investigation of Corporal Animal Forms in the Copan Valley. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 29(3):407–426.

——, Andrew D. Somerville, and Margaret J. Schoeninger. 2014. Stable Isotopes and Zooarchaeology at Teotihuacan, Mexico Reveal Earliest Evidence of Wild Carnivore Management in Mesoamerica. PLoSONE 10(9): e0135635. DOI:10.1371/journal.

Sugiyama, Saburo, and Leonardo López Luján. 2007. Dedicatory Burial/Offering Complexes at the Moon Pyramid, Teotihuacan. Ancient Mesoamerica 18(1):127–146.

Albert Davletshin (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow) and Stephen Houston (Brown University)

The Chinese proverb, “A Fox Cannot Hide Its Tail,” bears the same meaning as the English adage, “The Devil Cannot Hide His Cloven Hoof”—i.e., certain beings incline inescapably to mischief or worse. [1] The Chinese expression emphasizes the mischievous character of the canid, known for its ability to escape hunters and trick hens. Fox stories are told in many places over the world. There are Chinese fox-spirits that transform into beautiful women, the Fox-Woman Next Door of Russian tales, and the eponymous Reynard the Fox (Mish 1954:329–330; Stevens 2013:153–154; Ting 1985:41–44). Attitudes can be extreme. The English upper class harbored a special loathing for the animal, to judge from fox-hunting and its export throughout the British Empire (Robb 2020:65–67). In some traditions, two related species of canids, the jackal and the coyote, take the place of the fox (Berezkin 2010:135; 2014:349). The Coyote of Native North America is an exemplary trickster who plays pranks or disobeys social rules with impunity (Radin 1956). By contrast, the wolf, a more threatening being, ends up badly.

One species, the gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus), is known in the Maya area (Figure 1; Ceballos 2014:514–515). There, the role of the trickster who cheats everyone and ends foolishly trapped is delegated to Rabbit and Coyote. Foxes, however, receive the most attention. Among the Tzotzil people of Chiapas, we learn that “it is a very evil animal,” “its skin is stuffed and used on the fiesta of St. Sebastian to represent the president of Mexico,” “its bark is believed to announce disputes, sickness, broken bones, or murder on the road,” and that they are “the companion animal spirits of stupid people, especially Chamulas” (Laughlin 1975:368, see also Laughlin with Haviland 1988:327). Surprisingly, foxes are eaten by some Maya, and, in a curious detail given that practice, the animals are also said to consume the corpses of the dead (Hunn 1975:218). Such malevolent characteristics and local interest in them may explain why at least four Proto-Mayan names can be formally reconstructed for the same creature: *ch’umak, *waʔx, *weet, and *yaak (see, e.g., Kaufman and Justeson 2003:567-568). This implies many borrowings and, possibly, the operation of word taboos, resulting in several widespread cognate sets that nonetheless denote the same species (Emeneau 1948). Two of the reconstructed words have already been identified in the script. One is a personal name, ch’amak; another applies to a spirit companion, waax (Schele and Grube 1994:56; Grube and Nahm 1994:700). The aim of this note is to present a tentative identification of one more term for “fox” in the Maya script.

A sandstone slab from Tonina features a unique emblem glyph or royal title (Figure 2). We are grateful to Ángel A. Sánchez Gamboa and Guido Krempel for the opportunity to show this drawing and to consult a photo of the inscription, only a part of which was known through an unpublished field sketch by Ian Graham. Recently, in the course of Tonina conservation and documentation project, led by the Coordinación Nacional de Conservación de Patrimonio Cultural (CNPC) of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), this fragment was joined to another, smaller one. (These pieces will be published in a catalogue of the Tonina monuments by the CNCPC-INAH Project; more precise designations of these fragments are to come.) The title under discussion consists of a canine head with a syllable we and, above, a logograph ʔAJAW “lord, king” (for the we syllable see, Zender et al. 2016). The head sign features a canine tooth, trilobed ear, and dog’s nose, which can be observed in the logographic signs of other canids: TZ’Iʔ, tz’iʔ, “dog”, ʔOOK, ʔook, “dog (calendrical term),” CH’AMAK “fox,” and TZ’UTZ’, tz’utz’, “coati.” Recently, Christian Prager has also identified a logograph WAAX “gray fox” on a painted vessel, also with a fox head featuring the traits of canids (Prager 2020). Guido Krempel (personal communication, 2020) suggested to us that the fox’s head includes a spot at the corner of its mouth, which marks gray foxes and is attested in depictions of the animal on Classic Maya ceramics. This may well be the case, although the photo shows erosion in that part of the glyph. The title follows two blocks of ambiguous meaning: ʔu-TEʔ [yi]-ʔIHCH’AAK?-NOJ-la. These can be interpreted asʔu-teʔ yihch’aak nojool, “the stick (bailiff[?]) of Yihch’aak Nojool” (see Houston 2008). The word teʔ is highly polysemous in Mayan languages, various denoting “plant (of any kind),” “tree,” “wood,” “stick,” and by extension, “staff,” “official holding a staff,” “spear,” and “person possessing a spear,” i.e., “spear-carrier, warrior.” In this context, “official holding a staff, bailiff” is perhaps the most likely reading, “spear-carrier” being less probable. If this interpretation is correct, the name of the bailiff was likely in the lost part of the inscription together with the verb referring to the described event, possibly, although it is speculative, chuhkaj, “he is/was captured.” A distantly related cognate for the word “south” in Yucatec, nòohol (Bricker et al. 1998:199), suggests a short final vowel; because of the disharmonic spelling, we reconstruct the long vowel yet remain open to the presence of a glottalized variant. [2]

The name of the Fox lord, literally “His Paw(?), the South,” can be understood as either “The Paw(?) of the South,” “His Paw(?) is to the South” or “His Southern Paw(?).” However, in truth, these interpretations are somewhat unsatisfactory from a syntactic point of view. The title is followed by a partially preserved distance number that led to the lost record of another event—mi-HEEW-mi-WINAAK-ji-[ya] …, “no days, no months, … thence.” The numeral classifier for the “count of days” is written here with a rare version of the logograph HEEW, which depicts a deer head under two bones; to our knowledge, the only other example occurs on Bonampak Sculptured Stone 1:C1. It differs slightly from other versions that display a deer head with two crossed bones over the eye (e.g., Pestac Stela 1:D6; Palenque Palace Tablet:B18; Quirigua Stela H:T2) or a deer head with two bones that frame the head (Tonina Monument 162:A, Monument 170:A, Monument 175:pJ). Possibly, these relate to images of deer covered by mantles with crossed bones and eyeballs (e.g., Ek’ Balam Mural of the Deer; K2785). Excepting a few examples (Bonampak Sculptured Stone 1:C1; Quirigua Stela H:T2), the sign is usually complemented by a syllable wa. This surely cues a complex vowel in a logograph read HEEW. Importantly, the sign under discussion is not attested in other contexts, which excludes its interpretation as a syllable he. Cognates of the suffix have not yet been found in modern Mayan languages, so the long vowel is tentatively reconstructed here by means of the disharmonic spelling; the alternative reconstruction would contain a glottalized vowel.

Few Mayan words start with the consonant-vowel combination of we- (see, Kaufman and Justeson 2003:passim). That rarity is helpful here, as it suggests a likely candidate for the animal head at Tonina: (we)-WEET?, weet, “fox.” Several Mayan languages employ this word, including some spoken in the vicinity of Tonina. A relevant point is that Spanish gato montés, “forest cat,” and gato de monte, “cat of forest,” designate “wildcat (Felis silvestris)” and “bobcat (Lynx rufus),” but, in the Spanish of Southern Mexico, they unexpectedly refer to “gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus)” (Schoenhals 1988:584). The list below makes the orthographies consistent so as to facilitate comparison.

Proto-Mayan: *weet “gray fox” (for similar cognate sets, see Kaufman and Justeson 2003:567, Wichmann and Brown n.d.)

Teco: x=weʔch “fox” (Kaufman 1969:173)

Mam: weech “gato de monte” (Kaufman and Justeson 2003:567)

Popti: wech “gato de monte” (Kaufman and Justeson 2003:567)

Mocho: weech “gato de monte, zorra gris (Urocyon cinereoargenteus)” (Kaufman 1967:567)

Tuzanteco: weech “zorra, lobo, onza” (Kaufman and Justeson 2003:567)

Tojolabal: wet “gato de monte (Urocyon cinereoargentus)” (Lenkersdorf 2010:634)

Tzeltal: wet “a rare synonym of wax (Urocyon cinereoargentus), probably a loan from Tzotzil” (Hunn 1977:219)

Tzotzil: vet “gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus)” (Laughlin 1975:368)

Guided by the gloss in Tzotzil, Guido Krempel (personal communication, 2020) independently arrived at (we)-WEET. The development of *t into ch is regular in Mam, Mocho, Teco, and Tuzanteco, signaling the considerable antiquity of the reconstructed word. Nevertheless, other cognates imply a relatively shallow time-depth and multiple acts of borrowing. The glottalized vowel in Teco x=weʔch is irregular, as is the final consonant in Popti wech; the latter shows the final ch in the place of the regular t and looks to be a borrowing from Mam (for correspondences involving dental stops and palatal affricates, see Campbell 1984:6).

Another reconstructed word, *weech, “armadillo,” may be related to this set. However, this interpretation requires two scenarios in order to be accepted. First, the original term for “fox,” weet, was lost in Yucatecan languages yet preserved as a part of a compound term “turtle-fox” or “shell-fox,” a term for “armadillo” that later became simplified. Second, the word was borrowed into Tila Chol and perhaps Ch’orti’, leading to the irregular final ch, where t might be expected. The alternative interpretation is that two animal names *weet “fox” and *weech “armadillo” are unrelated and that their similarity arose solely by chance.

Proto-Yucatecan: (plus, Chol) *weech “armadillo” (for similar cognate sets, see Kaufman and Justeson 2003:567 Wichmann and Brown n.d.):

Chol (Tila dialect): wech, x=wech “armadillo” (Aulie and Aulie 1998:139)

Ch’orti’: aj=wech “tatugo/armadillo-like animal’ (Wisdom 1950; this entry may not belong here; note the verb root wech’-, “to untwist, unfold, unbraid, roll down”)

Mopan: wech “armadillo” (Schumann 1997:284)

Itzaj: wech “armadillo” (Hofling and Tesucún 1997:662)

Yucatec: h=wèech “armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus), small pig” (Bricker et al. 1998:301)

Lacandon: weech “armadillo” (Hofling 2014:381)

It has been suggested that Proto-Mayan *weet, “gray fox,” is a loan from Proto-Zoquean *weetu, “fox,” also borrowed into Colonial Mixtec <vidzu> “fox (calendrical day name)” and Xinka weeto “fox” (Campbell and Kaufman 1976:86). Although the word is found in only one published dictionary of Zoquean languages (Harrison et al. 1981: 192; see also Gómez Domínguez 2003:163), there are now cognates that may be added thanks to Roberto Zavala (personal communication, 2020).

Zoque de Santa María Chimalapa: wetuʔ “especie de comadreja, color café (tiene dibujo como zorrillo; tiene olor como de waku; delgadito; parecido de kuru; come muertos)” 

Jitotolteco: wetu[weru] “gato montés”

Zoque de Copainalá: wetu “gato montés, lince”

Zoque de Ocotepec: wetu [wedu]“gato montés”

These cognates allow us to reconstruct the Proto-Zoquean *wetuʔ, “gray fox”; as yet, no cognates occur in Gulf Zoquean languages. In his comparative work, Søren Wichmann (1995:158) suggested that the final glottal stop was irregularly inserted in Chimalapa Zoque disyllabic nominals. In fact, new data indicate that these glottal stops are retentions and that Chiapas Zoque dialects regularly lost final glottal stops in disyllabic nominals (see the sets for “new,” “short,” “star,” “white,” “woman,” etc.). Proto-Mayan *weet is a phonological adaptation of the Zoquean word with the loss of the final vowel and compensatory lengthening of the first vowel (Mayan languages tend to have monosyllabic lexical roots of the type CVC). The lowering of the final u to o in Jumaytepeque Xinka weeto, “fox,” is due to Xinka vowel harmony (Campbell 1972:187). The borrowing of the medial voiceless dental stop t of Proto-Zoquean *wetuʔ as a voiced dental fricative ð in Mixtec <vidzu> “fox” and as a lateral l in Proto-Huave *wìlɨ “fox, tail” can be explained by allophonic realizations [d] and [r] of the word-internal dental stop in Zoquean languages (for Proto-Huave, see Suárez 1975:116). Different patterns of phonological adaptation indicate that the Proto-Zoquean word was independently borrowed into Mayan, Mixtec, Xinka, and Huave languages.

These etymological data allow us to identify weet, “fox,” as a dialectal word at Tonina. Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Popti, and Chiapas Zoque are likely donors. The syntactic opacity of his name also lies outside the norm for Classic Ch’olt’ian. It is known that Tonina texts show some features shared by the closely related languages of Tzeltal and Tzotzil, of which the positional verbs marked by –h-…-aj seem to be the strongest examples (Lacadena and Wichmann 2005:35). As a further detail, the hieroglyphic name of Tonina, Popoʔ, has been interpreted as Zoquean in origin, ultimately derived from *Popoʔ Tzatɨk, “White Cave” (Lacadena and Wichmann 2005:46). The name of the Fox Lord may be another visitor from such languages.

The example of (we)-WEET raises two intriguing questions. Why was this word written with the initial phonetic complement? Such spellings are relatively infrequent in the script (Grube 2010). And why was the word written, not with a combination of two syllabic signs, but with a logograph, perhaps improvised for just this occasion? To answer the first question, distinguishing the image of the fox’s head from other canids may have posed special challenges for scribes. The syllabic prefix clarified visual overlaps with other canids and contrasted with waax, the more common name for “gray fox.” To answer the second, logographs plainly operated as an enduring emphasis in Maya script. Continuous, phrase-long sequences of syllabic signs seldom replaced them. In glyphs, logographs carried a decided semantic and existential weight, standing as evident proxies for perceptible things.

At Tonina, there was also a special pleasure, maybe, in drawing a creature with so many nuances…in reference to a lord whose very title connoted moral ambiguity.

[1] For other entries in the “Maya Creatures” series, see Musk, Dragons, Mosquitoes, Dogs, Teeth.

[2] In this essay we include complex vowels in logographic transcriptions; the alternative convention is to avoid such notation, reserving it for transliterations into language.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Tonina conservation and documentation project, led by the Coordinación Nacional de Conservación de Patrimonio Cultural of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, for the opportunity to use unpublished materials. Many thanks go to Guido Krempel, Ángel A. Sánchez Gamboa, and Roberto Zavala who generously shared their data with us. We are also grateful to Terrence Kaufman, Evgeniya Korovina, Guido Krempel, Christian Prager, Sergei Vepretskii, Søren Wichmann, and Mikhail Zhivlov for their valuable comments.

References

Aulie, H. Wilbur, and Evelyn W. de Aulie. 1998. Diccionario ch’ol de Tumbalá, Chiapas con variaciones dialectales de Tila y Sabanilla. México: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Berezkin, Yuri. 2010. Tricksters Trot to America. Areal Distribution of Folklore Motifs. Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 46:125–142.

——. 2014. Three Tricksters: World Distribution of Zoomorphic Protagonists in Folklore Tales. In Scala Naturae: Festschrift in Honour of Arvo Krikmann for his 75^th Birthday, edited by Anneli Baran, Liisi Laineste, and Piret Voolaid, pp. 347–356. Tartu: ELM Scholarly Press.

Bricker, Victoria, Eleuterio Po’ot Yah, and Ofelia Dzul De Po’ot. 1998. A Dictionary of the Maya Language as Spoken in Hocabá, Yucatán. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Campbell, Lyle. 1972. Mayan Loan Words in Xinca. International Journal of American Linguistics 38:187–190.

Campbell, Lyle. 1984. The Implications of Mayan Historical Linguistics for Glyphic Research. In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, pp. 1–16. Albany, New York: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York.

Campbell, Lyle, and Terrence Kaufman. 1976. A Linguistic Look at the Olmecs. American Antiquity 41(1):80–89.

Ceballos, Gerardo. 2014. Mammals of Mexico: The Most Comprehensive Reference on Mexico’s Diverse Mammalian Fauna. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Emeneau, M. B. 1948. Taboos on Animal Names. Language 24(1):56–63. doi:10.2307/410287

Gómez Domínguez, Domingo. 2003. Un acercamiento a la dialectología zoque. Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas: Centro Estatal de Lenguas, Arte y Literatura Indígenas, Gobierno del estado de Chiapas.

Grube, Nikolai. 2010. Preposed Phonetic Complements in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. In Linguistics and Archaeology in the Americas: The Historization of Language and Society, edited by Eithne B. Carlin and Simon van de Kerke, pp. 27–44. Leiden: Brill.

——, and Werner Nahm. 1994. Census of Xibalba: A Complete Inventory of Way Characters on Maya Ceramics. In The Maya Vase Book: A Corpus of Rollout Photographs of Maya Vases, Volume 4, edited by Barbara Kerr and Justin Kerr, pp. 686–715. New York: Kerr Associates.

Harrison, Roy, Margaret Harrison, and Cástulo García H. 1981. Diccionario zoque de Copainalá. México: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Hofling, Charles Andrew. 2014. Lacandon Maya – Spanish – English Dictionary. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

——, and Félix Fernando Tesucún. 1997. Itzaj Maya – Spanish – English Dictionary. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Houston, Stephen. 2008. A Classic Maya Bailiff? Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Ancient Maya Writing and Iconography.

Hunn, Eugene S. 1977. Tzeltal Folk Zoology: The Classification of Discontinuities in Nature. New York: Academic Press.

Kaufman, Terrence. 1967. Preliminary Mochó Vocabulary. Working Paper 5. Berkeley: Laboratory for Language-Behavior Research, University of California.

——. 1969. Teco–A New Mayan Language. International Journal of American Linguistics 35:154–174.

——, and John Justeson. 2003. A Preliminary Mayan Etymological Dictionary. Electronic document, FAMSI:

Lacadena, Alfonso, and Søren Wichmann. 2005. The Dynamics of Language in the Western Lowland Maya Region. In Art for Archaeology’s Sake: Material Culture and Style across the Disciplines, Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference of the Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary, edited by Andrea Waters-Rist, Christine Cluney, Calla McNamee, and Larry Steinbrenner, pp. 32–48. Calgary: University of Calgary Archaeological Association.

Laughlin, Robert M. 1975. The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

——, with John Haviland. 1988. The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán, with Grammatical Analysis and Historical Commentary. 3 vols. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 31. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Lenkersdorf, Carlos. 2010. Diccionario B’omak’umal tojol’ab’al – kastiya. = Diccionario tojolabal – español, Vol. 1. México.: Plaza y Valdés.

Mish, Charles C. 1954. “Reynard the Fox” in the Seventeenth Century. Huntington Library Quarterly 17(4):327-344. doi:10.2307/3816500

Prager, Christian. 2020. A Logogram for WAX “Grey Fox” in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Manuscript in possession of the authors.

Radin, Paul. 1956. The Trickster: A Study in Native American Mythology. New York: Schocken Books.

Robb, George. 2020. F is for FOX. In Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times, edited by Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani, pp. 63–70. Durham: Duke University Press.

Schele, Linda, and Nikolai Grube. 1995. Notebook for the XVIII Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at Texas. Part II. Tlaloc-Venus Warfare: The Peten Wars 8.17.0.0.0-9.15.13.0.0. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, Institute of Latin American Studies.

Schoenhals, Louise C. 1988. A Spanish—English Glossary of Mexican Flora and Fauna. México: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Schumann Gálvez, Otto. 1997. Introducción al maya mopán. México: UNAM.

Stevens, Keith. 2013. Fox Spirits (Huli) / 狐貍. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch 53:153–165.

Suárez, Jorge A. 1975. Estudios huaves. Collección Lingüistica 22. México: INAH.

Ting, Nai-Tung. 1985. A Comparative Study of Three Chinese and North-American Indian Folktale Types. Asian Folklore Studies 44(1):39–50. doi:10.2307/1177982

Wichmann, Søren. 1995. The Relationship among the Mixe-Zoquean Languages of Mexico. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

——, and Cecil H. Brown. n.d. Pan-Chronic Mayan Dictionary. Manuscript in possession of the authors.

Wisdom, Charles. 1950. Materials on the Chorti Language. Microfilm Collection of Manuscript Materials on Middle American Cultural Anthropology No. 28. Chicago: University of Chicago Library.

Zender, Marc, Dmitri Beliaev, and Albert Davletshin. 2016. The Syllabic Sign we and an Apologia for Delayed Decipherment. The PARI Journal 17(2):35–56.

Stephen Houston (Brown University)

In her classic book on women in preindustrial America, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (2001) unspools stories about things that were spun, woven, lashed, coiled, twined, stitched, embroidered or otherwise coaxed into wearable and usable form. Cloth and clothing, baskets and bedcovers: all appear to embody American ideologies of womanhood from colonial times to the 19th century. In processing thread or making textiles, mutual support tangled with competition, and helpful, sisterly gestures brushed up against tournaments of skill. Ulrich’s carefully chosen objects go deeper still. They attest to a young republic’s wish for economic autonomy, but they balance that against very personal matters of identity and ability, ambition and need.

The industrial revolution and its brick buildings would soon come along. There would be more concentrated settlements. Mills and congregant housing would jeopardize health and impose unfair demands on those within. Yet women’s work—fulfilling work—continued. There would be quilting bees, home-sewn dresses, knitting, and embroideries; there would be nods to a rural past that was in part imagined or idealized. Ulrich proves that large events live through small things. With scholarly attention, textiles and baskets from early America can be made to disclose “enduring habits of possession, and the mnemonic power of goods” (Ulrich 2001:418). In doing so, they provide unexpected glimpses of slighted people.

A volume of this quality gets one thinking. By now, Mayanists know of several objects owned by Classic Maya women. Such pieces, all of elites, carried practical utility, and, via glyphs, they discharged a certain “mnemonic power.” This is hardly surprising. Ulrich’s most telling objects have written labels or narratives, often tied to people who can be accessed through contemporary descriptions or their own diaries or letters. Such detail does not exist for the Classic Maya, yet there are gendered patterns to be discerned. Glyphically tagged weaving pins (puutz’ baak) occur at Buenavista del Cayo, Belize (Ball and Taschek 2018:fig. 13, linked to women from Naranjo, Tikal, and “9 Kab”), Dzbilchaltun, Mexico (Taschek 1994:fig. 32a, owned by IX tz’u-nu-*nu le ke), and the area of Holmul (Dacus 2005:figs. 27–39; Houston and Stuart 2001:64, fig. 3.2; a woman known as IX yo-OHL-la CH’E’N-na; to be sure, many pins or bodkins do not attest to male ownership, and a large number in Burial 116 at Tikal refer to figures and events in the distant past [Moholy-Nagy 2008:fig. 193c–f, figs. 194–196]). A jar for makeup or unguent has been found in the tomb of a queen at El Perú, Guatemala (Navarro-Farr et al. 2021:fig. 8), a women’s hair pin comes from Santa Rita, Belize (Helmke 2020:fig. 10), and a royal lady’s earspool from the area of Lake Petén Itza, Guatemala, later imported by some unknown mechanism to Altun Ha, Belize (Helmke 2020:fig. 7). The celebrated Spondylus shells from Burial 5 at Piedras Negras may refer to a number of foreign women, one from Namaan (La Florida, Guatemala), another, maybe, from Palenque, in contacts occurring over at least two generations. Yet the shells found their way into the tomb of a king (W. Coe 1959:figs. 53, 64). The few images of textiles with glyphs seem never to mention females, a surprise given the likelihood that women produced them.

The intense portability of the finds tagged glyphically to women leads to the suspicion that some of these pieces were not found in their place of manufacture. Royal women moved for political reasons, the pawns of dynastic alliance (Martin 2020:194–195, who also stresses the evidence for endogamous unions within kingdoms). Perhaps their possessions moved with them or, as heirlooms or precious goods, passed through multiple networks before insertion into a tomb or cache. Royal and noble women are frequently depicted in Maya imagery, and many of their names documented. The overriding impression, however, is that few objects were said overtly to belong to them. Either glyphs did not serve that purpose, for reasons of textual decorum, or the deprivation was real, a feature of a world in which elite men tended formally to possess prestigious objects and to deny those “habits of possession” to others. Indeed, a certain stinginess about dowries, and the complete or partial restriction of inheritances to men, struck Diego de Landa while commenting on early colonial Yucatan (Tozzer 1941:99, 101; but see Christensen and Restall [2019:79, 82, 123] for female ownership of looms, jewelry, animals, and some property in the 18th century).

The tendency holds true for tagged ceramics. According to glyphic texts, almost all belonged to men, and a considerable number to young men in particular (Houston 2018:67–82; but see K2695 for a vase owned by a queen— excavated at Tikal, it may depict the woman interred in this burial [Laporte and Fialko 1995:82, fn60, fig. 70]). The food and drink presumably prepared by women or served by them were not in ceramics they owned (see S. Coe 1994:141, for frothing of cacao by goddesses; or Houston et al. 2004:fig. 3.3, for a woman grinding maize—although mythic, the figures may have been perceived as normative exemplars). Men, usually a central male, seem to have done all the talking, eating, and drinking, aside from the mischief of a cheeky dwarf (K1453, Australian National Museum 82.22.92). In the rhetorical register of elite images,”royal needs and royal satiety” appear to be the main focus (Houston et al. 2004:130).

A notable exception comes from Xultun, Guatemala (for the history of the site, see Garrison and Stuart 2004; Houston 1986; Krempel and Matteo 2012; Rossi and Stuart 2020; Saturno et al. 2015). In a relatively short time, at least three royal ladies, two with the exalted titles of ba(h)kab and the female version of Emblem of the city (Ix Baax Witz Ajaw [Houston 1986; Prager et al. 2010)], have vases and elevated plates (jawte’, ajalhib) tagged with their ownership (Luin et al. 2018; Polyukhovych and Looper 2019). One vase (K8007) is unusually delicate and narrow, 6.5 cm in width—the better for a female grip (Figure 1)? A similar delicacy, of 6 cm in width, marks a vase from Tayasal, Guatemala (K2707). It is not tagged with female ownership but accords unusual prominence to two women. The queen whose name was probably read Ix Yax We’n Chahk, “Lady First/New Eating Chahk,” was also linked to a numbered succession of k’awiil, “13” in this case (Rossi and Stuart 2020:14). That was most likely a designation of a ruler’s sequence within a dynasty, in what Simon Martin (2005:7-8) has called a “short dynastic count.” Franco Rossi and David Stuart (2020:14) not only make a strong claim for such regnal status but point to a row of stelae belonging to this queen in front of Xultun’s Structure 11K17 (formerly Structure A-23, see von Euw and Graham [1984:79–89]). That building faced north to a key sakbih or causeway at the city, connecting two main clusters of Xultun. Her centrality was worked into the very fabric of the city.

Figure 1. A chocolate vase owned by Ix Yax We’n Chahk, Queen of Xultun (K8007).

The other queen was known as Ix We’n(?) ‘Om Yohl Ch’e’n (Polyukhovych and Looper 2019). Her tagged ceramics include a plate in the FUNBA collection (Fundación Nacional para las Bellas Artes y la Cultura) of La Antigua Guatemala (Figure 2), and a vase in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.2010.115.616, K5976). The name is suspiciously close to that of the owner of the weaving bones above (Ix Yohl Ch’e’n). Perhaps there was some family association between the two.

But these were not the only women who potentially owned pots at Xultun. An eroded passage on one chocolate vase contains a name that could be female designator (K2324). Another may, by one interpretation, belong to a female lord, with an image below of a server who happens to be, in a highly unusual touch, a royal lady of Xultun (Figure 3). The text above refers to a drinking vessel yu-UK’IB, but the head in that spelling is plainly that of a woman, not the more usual male; what follows in turn may be a ta-IX?-*AJAW-wa, i.e., a drinking vessel “for a royal lady.”

Another vase in a similar hand, if more loosely executed, highlights a lightly erotic scene with a female and a male (Figure 4). Such touching is rare in Maya imagery, as is the whimsical appearance of what may be a tethered pet (an insect?) below. [Note 1]

The Xultun ceramics, at least one of which belonged to a (probable) regnant queen, underscore their sheer anomaly. One of the few other such vases comes from Yucatan (Figure 5). Almost certainly from the area of Oxkintok, it refers to a vase (jaay) that belongs to a queen who makes an elegant appearance in a watery frame nearby. Outside of large carvings, a possession that depicts its owner is rare indeed in the Maya canon. High titles attach to her person, including a kaloomte’ and an under-spelled, directional bakab. Lower-ranking men might have owned pots, but it was a privilege accorded to only a few women of highest, even regnant rank, with a special emphasis at one site in particular, Xultun. An opening may have occurred there because of local dynamics of power and succession, or possibly because of the dominant personality of one woman: a Catherine the Great or a Cixi could exist elsewhere.

But, for most of the Classic Maya, “enduring habits of possession, and the mnemonic power of goods” seem to have been, for prestige ceramics, skewed towards explicit possession by males. Ultimately, this may say less about what women did or did not own—that could lie beyond empirical evidence—as to how glyphs obeyed conventional inequities of citation or reference.

Acknowledgements

Matthew Looper and Yuriy Polyukhovych were most helpful with the image from the FUNBA collection. Andrew Scherer, David Stuart, and Karl Taube shared leads on bugs.

Note 1 Andrew Scherer, David Stuart, and Karl Taube drew my attention to such pets in Yucatan today: the makech bugs, often bejeweled and pinned to clothing. That the Motul dictionary refers to such creatures in the late 16th and early 17th centuries attests to some time depth for this interest: Macech [Makech], “vnos escarauajos sin alas y con conchas, los quales, quando secos, ponen las indias a los niños en la garganta y en las muñecas por dixes” (Acuña 2001:378). Dried, dead bugs could have been mere ornament—shells glimmering with color and iridescence, inexpensive bling on young necks or wrists. Perhaps there was also a therapeutic or apotropaic function when mothers (las indias) attached them to children. Further searches show a thriving trade and support industry for such insect pets in Japan. Bugs participate in mini-gladiatorial bouts and, according to Ryohei Takatsuchi, one of Taube’s students, may even have inspired components of samurai armor. There could be worse analogies for warriors than the carapaced truculence of beetles.

References

Acuña, René, ed.. 2001. Calepino Maya de Motul, by Antonio de Ciudad Real. Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés.

Ball, Joseph W., and Jennifer T. Taschek. 2018. Aftermath A.D. 696—Late 7th and Early 8th Century Special Deposits and Elite Main Plaza Burials at Buenavista del Cayo, Western Belize: A Study in Classic Maya “Historical Archaeology.” Journal of Field Archaeology 43(6):472–491.

Christensen, Mark, and Matthew Restall. 2019. Return to Ixil: Maya Society in an Eighteenth-Century Yucatec Town. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado.

Coe, Sophie D. 1994. America’s First Cuisines. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Coe, William R. 1959. Piedras Negras Archaeology: Artifacts, Caches, and Burials. Museum Monographs. Philadelphia: University Museum.

Dacus, Chelsea. 2005. Weaving the Past: An Examination of Bones Buried with an Elite Woman. M.A. Thesis, Southern Methodist University.

de Smet, Peter A.G.M. 1985. Ritual Enemas and Snuffs in the Americas. Latin American Studies 33. Amsterdam: Centrum voor Studie en Documentatie van Latijns Amerika.

Garrison, Thomas, and David Stuart. 2004. Un análisis preliminar de las inscripciones que se relacionan con Xultun, Petén, Guatemala. In XVII Simposio de lnvestigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2003, edited by Juan Pedro Laporte, Barbara Arroyo, and Hector Mejía, 851-862. Guatemala City: Instituto de Antropologia e Historia de Guatemala.

Helmke, Christophe. 2020. Under the Lordly Monarchs of the North: The Epigraphy of Northern Belize. Ancient Mesoamerica 31:261–286.

Houston, Stephen D. 1986. Problematic Emblem Glyphs: Examples from Altar de Sacrificios, El Chorro, Río Azul, and Xultun. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 3. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

______. 2018. The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text. New Haven: Yale University Press.

______, and David Stuart. 2001. Peopling the Maya Court. In Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya, Volume I: Theory,, Comparison, and Synthesis, ed. Takeshi Inomata and Stephen Houston, pp. 54-83. Boulder: Westview Press.

______, _______, and Karl Taube. 2004. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Krempel, Guido, and Sebastian Matteo. 2012. Painting Styles of the North-eastern Peten from a Local Perspective: The Palace Schools of Yax We’en Chan K’inich, Lord of Xultun. Con­tributions in New World Archaeology 3:135-172.

Laporte, Juan Pedro, and Vilma Fialko. 1995. Un reencuentro con Mundo Perdido, Tikal, Guatemala. Ancient Mesoamerica 6:39–94.

Luin, Camilo A., Federico Fahsen, Dmitri Beliaev, and Guido Krempel. 2018. Dos vasijas maya desconocidas de la colección del Museo Popol Vuh. Mexicon 40:156-157.

Martin, Simon. 2005. Of Snakes and Bats: Shifting Identities at Calakmul. The PARI Journal 6(2):5–15.

_____. 2020. Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Moholy-Nagy, Hattula. 2008. Tikal Report No. 27, Part A: The Artifacts of Tikal: Ornamental and Ceremonial Artifacts and Unworked Material. University Museum Monograph 127. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Navarro-Farr, Olivia C., Griselda Pérez Robles, Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón, Elsa Damaris Menéndez Bolaños, Erin E. Patterson, Keith Eppich, and Mary Kate Kelly. 2021. Burial 61 at El Perú-Waka’s Structure M13-1. Latin American Antiquity 32:188–200.

Polyukhovych, Yuriy, and Matthew Looper. 2019. A Plate from the Xultun Area in the FUNBA Collection. Glyph Dwellers Report 62.

Prager, Christian, Elisabeth Wagner, Sebastian Matteo, and Guido Krempel. 2010. A Reading for the Xultun Toponymic Title as B’aax (Tuun) Witz Ajaw. Mexicon 32:74-77.

Rossi, Franco D. 2015. The Brothers Taaj: Civil-Religious Orders and Politics of Expertise in Late Maya Statecraft. Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University.

_____, and David Stuart. 2020. Stela 30: A New Window into Eighth Century Xultun. Mexicon XLII:12–15.

Saturno, William, Heather Hurst, Franco Rossi, and David Stuart. 2015. To Set Before the King: Residential Mural Painting at Xultun, Guatemala. Antiquity 89:122–136.

Taschek, Jennifer T. 1994. The Artifacts of Dzibilchaltun, Yucatan, Mexico: Shell, Polished Stone, Bone, Wood, and Ceramics. Middle American Research Institute Publication 50. New Orleans: Tulane University.

Tozzer, Alfred M. 1941. Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán: A Translation. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology XVIII. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. 2001. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Vintage Books.

von Euw, Eric, and Ian Graham. 1984. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 5, Part 2: Xultun, La Honradez, Uaxactun. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Stephen Houston (Brown University) and David Stuart (University of Texas, Austin)

Sporting events are much in mind these days, as we watch the end of the Tokyo Olympics. There is exhaustive training that leads to heartbreak or a medal and coveted position on the podium. But it is the team events that crowd with social drama, including athletes who languish on the bench and others, the captains, who toss the coin, lead the charge, and argue with referees. Not surprisingly — there is much money and prestige involved — scholars of sports give occasional thought to who might be chosen captain. The tasks are heavy, and selection cannot be undertaken lightly (Cotterill and Cheetham 2016), yet bonds of affection and kinship, a mistaken evaluation of someone for leadership, tend to operate more often than not (Fransen et al. 2019). The wrong person is put in charge, bungles things, and is kept there only by social pressures. Yet prowess comes into play as well. Leadership might be bestowed, as in soccer, on stars who manage better than others to dribble around opponents and land a shot, or, in the sports that involve horses, bring a team of them past the finish mark. Many dead Romans are forgotten, but not so Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who, in the early 2nd century AD, raced his chariot to many victories and a fortune greater than that of many Roman senators (Bell 2014:498; Struck 2010). A cunning and aggressive competitor, Diocles might lead from the beginning of the race (occupavit et vicit), dart around in the final moments (eripuit et vicit) or accelerate from far behind to swift victory (successit et vicit; Devitt 2019:186 fn.488).

For Maya ballplay, there is growing awareness of how big rubber balls might be — very big, as pointed out by Michael Coe (2003) — and the various acts by which they were thrown, yahlaj or possibly tz’ohnaj(?) being two such motions (see Beliaev and Houston 2020:fn.1; Stuart 1997; for an alternative reading of the second as jatz’naj, see Taube and Zender 2009:202–203, fig. 7.24; Zender 2004). There may even be an expression for the kneeling that takes place when a player is about to strike a ball, as on the Colonia La Esperanza marker from Chiapas, Mexico (Figure 1, Kowalski 1989:22fn.1). The text reads u-BAAH ta-OCH-K’AHK’ ta-ke-hi-na?, u baah ta ochk’ahk’ ta kehiin?, “his image/body in [the act] of fire-entering, in [the act] of… That final element recalls colonial Tzoztil, kejan ba, “bow, kneel” and kejel, “to be kneeling,” along with kehi, “kneel,” kehleh, “kneeling,” and kehuh, “genuflect” in present-day Tzotzil (Laughlin 1975:171; 1988, I:22); for its part, Tzetal has kejaj, “kneel,” and kejel, “kneeling” (Berlin and Kaufman 1997:35). The ballplayer is both dedicating the marker (or its court[?]) through the ritual of och-k’ahk’, “fire-entering” (Stuart 1998:387–389), and referring to the kneeling shown on the stone.

An important essay by Karl Taube and Marc Zender (2009) details the many acts of violence that took place in Maya ballcourts. An equally useful essay by Christophe Helmke and colleagues (2018) studies the equipment for the game. As scholars have long noted, a divide appears to exist in such gear. To one side are perishable originals, including the apparent “yoke” (yugo) or hip-protector found by chance as a cavity left by decay in the fine matrix of Burial 195 — this was the probable tomb of “Animal Skull” (K’inich Wawa’n[?] Ahk Bahlam) at Tikal, Guatemala (Guillemin 1968; Moholy-Nagy, with Coe 2008:66, fig. 231b, #12U-106/27; its plaster and gesso would lighten weight but presumably also flake and crack under vigorous use). Then there are the skeuomorphs, the imperishable versions in stone of which several have been found at Maya sites (Cruz Romero 2012; Shook and Marquis 1996:27–59). The “yuguitos” or “small yugos,” for example, appear to reproduce the knee pads worn by players while kneeling. If used, however, they would quite smash, in patellar agony, the body part they were supposed to protect (Helmke et al. 2018:12–13, fig. 6). There is a proposal that stones were worn but in slower ritual movement, in evocations of actual ballplay but without its actual, herky-jerky violence (for debates on wearability, see Alegría 1951:349; Clune 1963; Ekholm 1946, 1961). Gordon Ekholm notes that, despite their 18 to 27 kilo weight, many yokes might be worn around the hips provided the user were “not an exceptionally large person and still retains a certain athletic slimness… [of] non-civilized peoples” (Ekholm 1946:596). The most fetching illustration of this comes from an article by Stephan De Borhegyi, which shows a suitably slim man and woman — the author and his wife, Suzanne? — decked out in such gear (Figure 2).

Looking at all ballgear is beyond the reach of a blog. But a glyphically embellished find from the site of Bolonk’in, not far from Chilón, Chiapas, raises the question of what to call the yoke (Figure 3, Shesheña and Lee Whiting 2004; the image, although missing a few glyphs, such as a 7 Imix day sign, is beautifully redrawn in Helmke et al. 2018:fig. 5). The shell glyphs on the yoke were inlaid (Shesheña and Lee Whiting 2004:fig. 1) and leave little doubt, as others have explained, that this is a name-tagged object belonging to the subordinate of a ruler of Tonina, Mexico (Helmke et al. 2018:11–12). The key element is the first glyph block in the text below. On the basis of a recent decipherment, it must read u-ya’-tuun, not u-tun-‘a or some other possibility (see Grube 2020:fig. 7). A proposal by Stuart, YA’ or ya’, is securely tied to concepts of “pain” in some readings, and this meaning seems valid in many contexts (Beliaev and Houston 2020; see also Grube 2020). But Maya glyphs also employ homophones. That principle of substitution may operate here.

A perusal of Mayan dictionaries reveals an entry of *jol ya’ for “cadera” or hip in Ch’ol (Aulie and Aulie 1998:121; see also b’äkel ya’ “cadera” in Hopkins et al. 2010:15). The use of “head” (jol) to preface body parts, or rather, parts of body parts, occurs in Ch’orti’ as well: jor-b’aker, “hip,” and jor-pik, “waistband area of a skirt” (Hull 2016:178). The term ya’ for “hip” is probably also documented as ‘o’il, “hip” in Tzotzil, a language with well-attested variance between /a/ and /o/ phonemes (Laughlin 1975:452), and in Ch’ol terms for “thigh,” i ya’ (Warkentin and Scott 1980:116), and a,”muscle/thigh” in Ch’olti’ (Robertson et al. 2010:331). Thus, the term on the yoke is not “pain” but “hip”—indeed, a “hip-stone,” as shown in De Borhegyi’s playful image.

The reading opens many possibilities. An issue with reading ya’ as “pain” is that objects were clearly involved in a number of texts. There were things taken or received, ch’am, or, in one instance, name-tagged to a long-decayed backing (Beliaev and Houston 2020:figs. 4c, d). The exquisite shells from Piedras Negras offer a test-case of this. Found by Héctor Escobedo in the first days of a multi-year project with Houston, these proved eventually to come from the tomb of a ruler at the city, Itzam K’an Ahk, a.k.a. “Ruler 4” in the ordering of Tatiana Proskouriakoff (Figure 4, Escobedo 2004:279). Further study of these shells led to the realization that they mentioned Yopaat Bahlam, the “missing” king of Yaxchilan who was recorded on Panel 3 at Piedras Negras (Martin and Grube 2008:149; Martin 2020:134). The date in the first glyph is likely 9.15.15.10.16, Jan. 3, AD 747, one of the few calendrical records for a lord otherwise erased from Yaxchilan’s official history. But it is the name tag that is relevant here, for it displays ya’ with its prefixed (and purely iconic) obsidian blade, along with a subfixed ‘a to reinforce the reading.

In the same tomb is the mosaic, also in Spondylus shell, of a ballplayer pieced together by Zac Hruby, the lithicist for the Piedras Negras Project (Figure 5). It seems plausible that the glyphs pertain to this image, and that the shells once fitted either into a perished tableau of ballplaying or, as seen enduringly in the Bolonk’in piece, a long-disappeared yoke. The ya’ simply referred to “hip” but also to the “yoke” that simulated and protected this body part. (In English, by a similar convention,”girdle” refers to the pelvis but also to an item of clothing encircling the waist.) Yopaat Bahlam came to visit Piedras Negras — did he also play there or provide a piece of ballgame gear to the local king? Or was it won as a trophy in play? It was certainly valued enough to be included in his host’s tomb.

Dos Pilas, Guatemala, also has ya’ spellings that cue a concrete, portable object and affirm a link to ballplay (Figure 6). The earliest known monumental inscription at the city, Hieroglyphic Stairway 2, Center, refers to a ch’am “take, receive” event with a probable yoke at 9.10.10.16.9 4 Muluk 2 Mak, Oct. 29, AD 643. At this juncture, the local Lord, Balaj Chan K’awiil, was 18 years old and, a few years before, at 9.10.1.3.19, had been involved in some bloody event, perhaps ‘i-LOK'[yi] ti-ta-ji, taaj being a well-known term for “obsidian.” That is, he was surely mature enough for rough activity. The text referring to the yoke is partly eroded, but the reference is followed by a title string associated with “ballplay,” ba-TE’ pi-tzi (cf. Dos Pilas Hieroglyphic Stairway 4, Step IV:K1–L1). This is unlikely to be a coincidence. The other allusion to “receiving/taking a yoke” appears on Dos Pilas Hieroglyphic Stairway 1. Although an unfinished text, especially its upper riser (which may date later), the stairway adjoins this reference to a scene of ballplayers in full gear. They are evidently in some ritual in which gear is being broken out or balls unwrapped.[1] As at Piedras Negras, the juxtaposition of text and image is unlikely to have arisen by chance.

In sum, there is evidence that YA’ functioned as a homophonic sign. In a few examples it also occurs as a title, usually of subordinate lords, even princes at court. YA’ is prefixed by BAAH or ba, doubtless for baah, “head, first.” Similar constructions occur in Maya texts, where that prefix creates a title by attaching itself to the name of an object, a flint (took’), shield (pakal), staff (te’) or throne (tz’am, Houston 2014:27–28, fig. 17). The title implies habitual service; the adjective “head” or “first” denotes salience in those duties. They apply to people in principal charge of — or most skilled at — the care or use of an object at dynastic courts. Examples in Figure 7 attest to a similar pattern with yokes. Young princes of royal houses appear to be the “Head Yoke” or “Head [Person of the] Yoke.”[2] The ballcourt ring from Oxkintok refers to the local ruler in the company of “youths” (ch’oktaak) and may then give two names in succession, concluding with baah (or ba) ya’, the “head yoke” or “head person of the yoke. The very setting points to an overt association with ballplay. The other examples hint that they too were given distinction in this sport. Perhaps the Baah Ya’ were victorious athletes or, as leaders, “captains of the team.”

[1] Dressing scenes in Maya imagery tend to be anticipatory, not about packing up afterwards; see Bonampak Room 1 and K2695, in which royalty is being prepared for dance.

[2] Marc Zender (personal communication from 2018) wonders whether there might be an implicit agentive ‘a or aj in such spellings. That is a real possibility, as hinted at in Figure 7, BAAH-‘a~AJ[YA’] by one reading. But it would not shift the general meaning here.

References

Alegría, Ricardo E. 1951. The Ball Game Played by the Aborigines of the Antilles. American Antiquity 16:348–352.

Aulie, H. Wilbur, and Evelyn W. de Aulie. 1998. Diccionario Ch’ol de Tumbalá y Sabanilla, edited Emily F. Scharfe de Stairs. Mexico City: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Beliaev, Dmitri, and Stephen D. Houston. 2020. A Sacrificial Sign in Maya Writing. Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Ancient Maya Writing and Iconography. Accessed Aug. 4, 2021.

Bell, Sinclair. 2019. Roman Chariot Races: Charioteers, Factions, Spectators. In A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity, edited by Paul Christesen and Donald G. Kyle, pp. 492–504. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Berlin, Brent, and Terrence Kaufman. 1997. Un pequeño glosario Tzeltal de Tenejapa, Chiapas, Mexico. Athens, GA: Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia.

Clune, Francis J., Jr. 1963. Borhegyi’s Interpretation of Certain Mesoamerican Objects as Ball-Game Handstones. American Antiquity 29:241–242.

De Borhegyi, Stephan F. 1964. Pre-Columbian Ball-Game Handstones: Rejoinder to Clune. American Antiquity 30:84–86.

Coe, Michael D. 2003. Another Look at the Maya Ballgame. In Il sacro e il paesaggio nell’America indigena, edited by Davide Dominici, Carolina Orsini, and Sofia Venturoli, pp. 197–204. Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna.

Cotterril, Stewart T., and Richard Cheetham. 2016. The Experience of Captaincy in Professional Sport: The Case of Elite Professional Rugby. European Journal of Sport Science 17:2, 215–221.

Cruz Romero, José L. 2012. Los yugos y hachas votivas de Palenque. Arqueología Mexicana 113:52–55.

Ekholm, Gordon F. 1946. The Probable Use of Mexican Stone Yokes. American Anthropologist 48:593–606.

—. 1961. Puerto Rican Stone Collars. In Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, edited by Samuel K. Lothrop “and others,” pp. 356–371. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Escobedo, Héctor L. 2004. Tales from the Crypt: The Burial Place of Ruler 4, Piedras Negras. In Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya, by Mary Miller and Simon Martin, pp. 277–279. London: Thames and Hudson.

Fransen, Katrien, Stewart T. Cotterill, Gert Vande Broek, and Filip Boen. 2019. Unpicking the Emperor’s New Clothes: Perceived Attributes of the Captain in Sports Teams. Frontiers in Psychology 10:2212.

García-Gallo, Alfonso. 1992. El anillo jeroglífico del juego de pelota de Oxktinok. In Oxkintok 4, edited by Miguel Rivera Dorado, pp. 177– 184. Madrid: Proyecto Oxkintok, Misión Arqueológica de España en México.

Grube, Nikolai. 2010. A Logogram for YAH “Wound.” Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya, Research Note 21. Accessed Aug. 4, 2021.

Guillemin, Jorge F. 1968. Un “yugo” de madera para el juego de pelota. Antropología e Historia de Guatemala 20:25–33.

Helmke, Christophe, Jason Yaeger, and Mark Eli. 2018. A Figurative Hacha from Buenavista del Cayo, Belize. The PARI Journal 18(3):7-26. Accessed Aug. 4, 2021.

Hopkins, Nicholas A., J. Kathryn Josserand, and Ausencio Cruz Guzmán. 2010. A Historical Dictionary of Chol (Mayan): The Lexical Sources from 1789 to 1935. Tallahassee: Jaguar Tours. Accessed Aug. 4, 2021.

Houston, Stephen D. 2012 Painted Vessel (Plate 56). In Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, Miriam Doutriaux, Reiko Ishihara-Brito, and Alexandre Tokovinine, pp. 314-321. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

—. 2014. The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hull, Kerry. 2016. A Dictionary of Ch’orti’ Mayan-Spanish-English. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Kowalski, Jeff K. 1989. The Mythological Identity of the Figure on the La Esperanza (“Chinkultic“) Ballcourt Marker. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 26–27. Washington, DC: Center for Maya Research.

Laughlin, Robert M. 1975. The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

—.1988. The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán, Volume I, Tzotzil-English. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Martin, Simon. 2020. Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—, and Nikolai Grube 2008. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. 2nd edition. London: Thames and Hudson.

Moholy-Nagy, Hattula, with William R. Coe. 2008. The Artifacts of Tikal: Ornamental and Ceremonial Artifacts
and Unworked Material. Tikal Reports 27A. Philadelphia: University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.

Robertson, John S., Danny Law, and Robbie A. Haertel. 2010. Colonial Ch’olti’: The Seventeenth-Century Morán Manuscript. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Robicsek, Francis, and Donald M. Hales. 1981. The Maya Book of the Dead, The Ceramic Codex: The Corpus of Codex Style Ceramics of the Late Classic Period. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Art Museum.

Sheseña, Alejandro, and Thomas A. Lee Whiting. 2004. Yugo incrustado con glifos mayas procedente de los
alrededores de Chilón, Chiapas. Mexicon 26:127–132.

Shook, Edwin M., and Elayne Marquis. 1996. Secrets in Stone: Yokes, Hachas and Palmas from Southern
Mesoamerica. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge Volume 217. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.

Struck, Peter T. 2010. Greatest of All Time. Lapham’s Quarterly. Accessed Aug. 4, 2021.

Stuart, David. 1997. Ts’o Notes. Unpublished chart.

–. 1998. “The Fire Enters His House”: Architecture and Ritual in Classic Maya Texts. Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, edited by Stephen Houston, pp. 373-425. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Taube, Karl A., and Marc Zender. 2009. American Gladiators: Ritual Boxing in Ancient Mesoamerica. In Blood and Beauty: Organized Violence in the Art and Archaeology of Mesoamerica and Central America, edited by Heather Orr and Rex Koontz, pp.161–220. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.

Warkentin, Viola, and Ruby Scott. 1980. Gramática Ch’ol. Serie gramática de lenguas indígenas de México 3. Mexico City: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Zender, Marc. 2004. Glyphs for “Handspan” and “Strike” in Classic Maya Ballgame Texts. The PARI Journal 4(4):1–9.

Stephen Houston (Brown University)

For the ever-sunny George Stuart, on his birthday

Humans have long been intrigued by the sun, its shadows, and the ways of monitoring them over time. The reasons for that interest are obvious: by paying attention to the effects of the sun, observers could tell the time of day, determine the seasons, and separate or mark parts of the year. But how does one do such tasks precisely? In antiquity, this was mostly made possible by that “simplest” of “scientific instrument[s],” the gnomon (Isler 1991:155). Often little more than a vertical stick or pole, the gnomon cast little shadow at midday. But when the sun rose or fell, shadows extended considerably, and, if observed at equinoxes, aligned with reasonable accuracy to “true” east and west (Isler 1991:180; see also Dash 2017). In China, gnomons (gui biao) showed another innovation. Holes in them would be used to project shadows onto horizontal scales laid out north-south in relation to the vertical gnomon (Li and Sun 2009:1380, fig. 2).

A sundial focuses on the direction of shadows to establish the time of day.[1] More elaborate gnomons target the length of shadows, for this allows the time of year to be determined. In some cases, as in imperial China and early India, measurements of shadows were tabulated over centuries (Yano 1986:26), and the instruments to measure them could be large or even monumental. At Denfeng in Henan province, China, the horizontal scale ran over over 31 m (Li and Sun 2009:fig. 2). Places to observe the positions of the sun have been proposed for much of Mesoamerica, including: caves with overhead openings to permit the entry of sunlight; the celebrated “E-groups,” in part with solar orientations, that coalesced in the Preclassic period; buildings oriented towards sunrise events; and solstitial alignments in doorways at Yaxchilan, Mexico (e.g., Anderson 1981; Aylesworth 2015:787–789; Espinasa-Pereña and Diamant 2012:table 2; Zaro and Lohse 2005:89–93; Tate 1992:94–96). These involved observations, but whether they were “observatories” per se depends on whether a particular feature is “performative rather than practical, a theater rather than a laboratory, a planetarium rather than an observatory” (Aveni 2003:163). In other words, they might have borne witness to solar events, those almost miraculous synchronizations of light, shadow, and place. But they were not “scientific” instruments collecting data over time.

The focus on the sun and its diurnal passage may elucidate an unusual stela erected at the city of Machaquila, Guatemala. Dating to Dec. 2, A.D. 711 (Julian), this monument is, on its front and back, an almost square carving with a head protruding from its top (Figure 1, Graham 1967:87–88, figs. 33). At the bottom is a witz or “hill” element, an emblem of fixity. Just above floats the local king as the embodiment of lordly time at the close of a katun (20-year) period. The glyphs frame that day sign portrait of the ruler with a relatively unembellished, angular sky band that once contained glyphs, now in a poor state of preservation. (Many stylized sky bands take this shape, suggesting a rather rectilinear view of that part of the cosmos.) As for the head, it shows many characteristics of the Classic Maya Sun God: the large “eagle eyes,” possibly crossed (pupils closer to the nose), and a polished mirror-like element in the forehead. Notably, this is the first datable monument at Machaquila, and Andrés Ciudad Real and colleagues have wondered if this carving came just after the movement of the Machaquila dynasty from another location on the Pasión river to the southwest (Ciudad Ruiz et al. 2013:77). The ruler of this time was one Sihyaj K’in Chahk, or Chahk [being] Born from the Sun, a fact inferred from a statement of parentage on the all-glyphic Stela 11 at Machaquila (Graham 1967:fig. 63). Stela 11 dates 30 years after Stela 13, and the reference to this individual by a sequent ruler fits the chronology. That this ruler was “born” from an entity highlighted on the carving is unlikely to be a coincidence. Stela 11 faces west, so viewers would see the Sun God rising from the east, framed above the sky and the floating image, doubtless a portrait, of the current ruler. Much like Chahk, his namesake, the king grasps an axe. He evidently hovered above or was about to land on the firmament of Machaquila itself.

A superb visualization by Andrés Ciudad Ruiz and colleagues reveals the setting of Stela 13  (Figure 2). To the west is a sunken quatrefoil, found on excavation to contain incensario fragments, whistles, and other ceremonial artifacts (Cuidad Ruiz et al. 2010:133–141). As Stuart and Houston noted long ago, this quatrefoil matches the place name of Machaquila (Stuart and Houston 1994:33, fig. 37). On another carving, Stela 10, Chahk looks up from that quatrefoil, in the face-up position assumed by newborns (Graham 1967:fig. 60). This could be another allusion to the first-known ruler at the city, a figure whose very name refers to birth (sihyaj). We do not know for certain, but the quatrefoil could have been basin that filled with water; after all, its excavators note that it was probably plastered at one time, an effective means of keeping water in place (Ciudad Ruiz et al. 2010:133). Behind Stela 13 is an arrangement of two buildings, Structures 17 and 16, numbered from north to south. The cleft between them aligns closely with the top of Stela 13.

This is where the Sun God’s head comes into play. It was not just a deity above a sky band but possibly a gnonom, in the narrow sense of a vertical device used to cast shadows. The sun would rise between the buildings behind the stela, and the shadow of the head thereby reach to quatrefoil in the plaza. For its part, the head would be surrounded by an aureole of light in the early morning. In a straight line from there to the other side of the plaza was a stone model of a cosmic turtle: Altar 4, a conventional representation of the terrestrial world (Graham 1967:92–95, figs. 71–74). The carvings and plaza must have been planned with this alignment in mind. As a sequence of carvings and hollows, Plaza A at Machaquila enchained the sun, time, water, and the earth’s rocky surface (Figure 3).

The shape of Stela 13 has parallels in other sites that are relatively close by. Stela with such everted “tangs” are also documented at the related site of Cancuen, Guatemala, where the Machaquila Emblem is attested in joint use with another, more local title. That second Emblem might have first been used at Tres Islas, a small settlement between the two, larger communities of Machaquila and Cancuen. It was also a place evincing close attention to solar alignments. The three Early Classic stelae at Tres Islas clearly form a single composite image of a central figure over a cave with an ancestral female (Stela 2), flanked by two figures in the dress of Teotihuacan warriors (Stelae 1 and 3); the layout in turn evokes the composition and content of the front and sides of Tikal Stela 31, with the main difference being the separation at Tres Islas of one overall image into  three separate carvings. More to the point, the stelae at Tres Islas have been credibly tied to solar alignments (Barrios and Quintanilla 2008: 215–217; Tomasic et al. 2005:392–396). A viewing point from an altar just to the west would look east to the stelae. Behind them, the sun would rise at “true” east for the central stelae, at the equinoxes (or quarter year) for the other two.

At Cancuen, the tanged sculptures include Stelae 1 and 2 (both carved), and Stelae 5 and 8 (both “plain” or unadorned, Tourtellot et al. 1978:227–231). In all cases, these carvings were oriented with one side to the east, another to the west (Maler 1908:fig. 8; Morley 1937:pl. 196b; but note that Gair Tourtellot and colleagues [1978:fig. 5] situated Stela 1 facing south, a fact countered by earlier sources reporting on the site before its carvings were disturbed or moved). Much like Machaquila Stela 13, the tangs on the carvings could also serve as gnomons on an east-west orientation. Indeed, according to Sylvanus Morley, who visited Cancuen in 1915, Stelae 1 and 2 were placed in an east-west line with respect to each others (Morley 2021:230). Stela 1 has another relevant feature (Figure 4). The east side depicts a local queen, the west a later ruler of Cancuen (Maler 1908:pl. 13). Yet the stela also has two quite distinct holes made with obvious care by the sculptor(s); he (or they) visually accommodated the holes by surrounding them with smoky volutes. In addition, there were smaller holes along the side, prompting Maler to speculate that “victims were bound …to these stelae, the sacrifice probably being usually performed with the victim in an upright position” (Maler 1908:44). Such perishable attachments are known in imagery and on Stela 1 from Ixkun, Guatemala (Houston 2016; Stuart 2014), but the main holes hint at conduits for sunlight, in ways that recall the deliberate, calibrated perforations of Chinese gnomons. In China these were arranged north-south, so the parallel cannot be exact. Yet the orientation at Cancuen suggests at least some solar motivation for the holes. At dawn or sunset light would pass through, to shine on some surface in front or behind the stelae, and perhaps on each other.

The suggestion that the Sun God head at Machaquila, the “tangs” at Cancuen, or the perforations on Stela 1 at that site operated as gnomons for light and shadow accords with their position, orientation, and imagery, especially at Machaquila. If gnomons, they could have been performative, even providing a kind of cosmic theater, but the play of light perhaps helped with observations too. A careful study of them is impeded by looting and displacement of carvings; many monuments are no longer in their original position. Nonetheless, it seems possible that, at sites far beyond Machaquila and Cancuen, the Maya choreographed and manipulated beams and shadows from the sun. Stelae were freestanding, yet, by such displays, in ways not yet fully studied or understood, they interacted with spaces and surfaces nearby.

[1] In a recent email, Walter Witschey, a Mayanist colleague, informs me that, for a time, he held the record for the largest analemmatic (graduated scale) sundial ever made: “for size (1/3 acre)[,] gnomon height (25′)[,] and accuracy (30 sec midday and 5 sec early morning and late afternoon).” Clearly, this is not an exhausted skill or art form. After this was first posted, Kristin Landau also drew my attention to an intriguing paper on Copan Stela D as a possible gnomon (Pineda de Carías et al. 2017). 

References

Anderson, Neal S. 1981 The Solar Observatory at Xochicalco and the Maya Farmer’s Almanac. Archaeoastronomy 4(2):22–25.

Aveni, Anthony F. 2003. Archaeoastronomy in the Ancient Americas. Journal of Archaeological Research 11(2):149–191

Aylesworth, Grant R. 2015. E-Group Arrangements. In Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnohistory, edited by Clive L. N. Ruggles, pp. 783–791. New York: Springer.

Barrios, Edy, and Claudia Quintanilla. 2008. Tres Islas: Un pequeño centro de comercio de las Tierras Bajas en el río Pasión, Sayaxche, Petén. In XXI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2007, edited by Juan Pedro Laporte, Bárbara Arroyo, and Héctor Mejía, pp. 214–238. Guatemala CityÑ Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.

Ciudad Ruiz, Andrés, Alfonso Lacadena García-Gallo, Jesús Adánez Pavón, and Ma. Josefa Iglesias Ponce de León. 2010. Espacialidad y ritual en Machaquilá, Petén, Guatemala. In El ritual en el mundo maya: de lo privado a lo público, edited by Andrés Ciudad Ruiz, Ma. J. Iglesias Ponce de Léon, and Miguel Sorroche Cuerva, pp. 129–151. Madrid: Sociedad Española de Estudios Mayas-Grupo de Investigación, Andalucía-América-Centro Peninsular en Humanidades y Ciencias Socials, UNAM.

——. 2013. Crisis y supervivencia en Machaquilá, Petén, Guatemala. In Millenary Maya Societies: Past Crises and Resilience, edited by M.-Charlotte Arnauld and Alain Breton, pp. 73–91 (on Mesoweb).

Dash, Glen. 2017. Occam’s Egyptian Razor: The Equinox and the Alignment of the Pyramids. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Architecture 2:1–8.

Espinasa-Pereña, Ramón and Ruth Diamant. 2012. Possible Use of a Lava Tube as a Zenithal Observatory Near Cantona Archaeological Site, Puebla, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 23(4):585–596.

Isler, Martin. 1991. The Gnomon in Egyptian Antiquity. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 28:155–185.

Graham, Ian. 1967. Archaeological Explorations in El Peten, Guatemala. Middle American Research Institute, Publication 33, New Orleans: Tulane University.

Houston, Stephen. 2016. Maya Stelae and Multi-Media. Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Ancient Maya Writing and Iconography.

Li, Yong, and Xiao-Chun Sun. 2009. Gnomon Shadow Lengths Recorded in the Zhoubi Suanjing: The Earliest Meridian observations in China? Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics 9(12):1377–1386.

Maler, Teobert. 1908. Explorations of the Upper Usumatsintla and Adjacent Region: Altar de Sacrificios; Seibal; Itsimté-Sácluk; Cankuen. Reports of Explorations for the Museum, Memoirs 4(1). Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Morley, Sylvanus G. 1937. The Inscriptions of Peten, Volume V, Part 2, Plates. Publication 437. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.

——. 2021. The Archaeological Field Diaries of Sylvanus Griswold Morley, 1914–1916, edited by Prudence M. Rice and Christopher Ward, Mesoweb.

Pineda de Carías, María C., Nohemy L. Rivera, and Cristina M. Argueta. 2017. Stela D: A Sundial at Copan, Honduras. Ancient Mesoamerica 28(2):543-557. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536116000286

Stuart, David. 2014. Notes on a Sacrifice Scene. Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Ancient Maya Writing and Iconography.

——, and Stephen Houston. 1994. Classic Maya Place Names. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 33. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Tate, Carolyn E. 1992. Yaxchilan: The Design of a Maya Ceremonial City. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Tomasic, John, Claudia Quintanilla, and Edy Barrios. 2005. Excavaciones en el sitio arqueológico Tres Islas, Río Pasión, Petén. In XVIII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2004, edited by Juan Pedro Laporte, Bárbara Arroyo, and Héctor Mejía, pp. 403–412. Guatemala: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.

Tourtellot, Gair, III, Jeremy A. Sabloff, and Robert Sharick. 1978. A Reconnaissance of Cancuen. In Excavations at Seibal, Department of Peten, Guatemala, edited by Gordon R. Willey, pp. 191–240. Memoirs 14(2). Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University,

Yano, Michio. 1986. Knowledge of Astronomy in Sanskrit Texts of Architecture (Orientation Methods in the Īśānaśivagurudevapaddhati). Indo-Iranian Journal 29(1):17–29.

Zaro, Gregory, and Jon C. Lohse. 2005 Agricultural Rhythms and Rituals: Maya Solar Observation in Hinterland Blue Creek, Northwestern Belize. Latin American Antiquity 16(1):81–98.

With this post we are pleased to present another new issue of the long-running series Research Reports on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, published by the Boundary End Archaeological Research Center. Number 64 of the series is available here for download as a pdf, and future numbers will be posted here on Maya Decipherment. The full digital archive of the RRAMW series (1984-present) will soon be available on the BEARC website, and announced here as well.

RRAMW 64: A Logogoram for WAX “Grey Fox,” in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing by Christian Prager.

New paper by David Stuart, Heather Hurst, Boris Beltran and William Saturno. Published as an open access paper in Science Advances, vol. 8, issue 15, 13 April 2022

Abstract: Here, we present evidence for the earliest known calendar notation from the Maya region, found among fragments of painted murals excavated at San Bartolo, Guatemala. On the basis of their sealed contexts in an early architectural phase of the “Las Pinturas” pyramid, we assign these fragments to between 300 and 200 BCE, preceding the other well-known mural chamber of San Bartolo by approximately 150 years. The date record “7 Deer” represents a day in the 260-day divinatory calendar used throughout Mesoamerica and among indigenous Maya communities today. It is presented along with 10 other text fragments that reveal an established writing tradition, multiple scribal hands, and murals combining texts with images from an early ritual complex. The 7 Deer day record represents the earliest securely dated example of the Maya calendar and is important to understanding the development of the 260-day count and associated aspects of Mesoamerican religion and cosmological science.

by David Stuart

Posting a new drawing of the hieroglyphic texts on the famous Marcador sculpture of Tikal. I made this as part of my upcoming publication on aspects of Teotihuacan-Maya history, slated to appear next year with Dumbarton Oaks. The drawing is based on inspection of photos and digital scans, and corrects a few minor errors in other drawings that have appeared since the Marcador was discovered back in the early 1980s.

Each text panel focuses on a particular event. The first recalls the conquest of Tikal in 378 CE led by the famous Sihyaj K’ahk’, who in some capacity seems to have acted at the behest of the Teotihuacan ruler who I prefer to call Eagle Striker (“Spearthrower Owl” being an old nickname). Sihyaj K’ahk’ arrival to the Peten in that year was a transformative political event, broadly affecting the Maya political order of the Early Classic. The second text panel focuses on the dedication of the Marcador itself sixty years later in 414, highlighting its association with Eagle Striker, whose name is also prominently displayed within the center of sculpture’s rosette-like shield. As background for this, Eagle Striker’s accession in 374 is cited at the beginning of the second text panel (E1-E5).