Conclusion

Most of the sculptures of Piedras Negras are no longer in the places where the Yokib rulers of the seventh and eighth centuries installed them. Yet in their original contexts—both at Piedras Negras and other Maya sites—these sculptures impelled human interaction. The Classic period Maya referred to the sculptures as k’uhul (holy), and it is abundantly clear that they invested them with profound potency. The forms, sizes, images, texts, and physical contexts of Maya sculptures worked in multiple ways to engage people and their bodies, obliging them to move closer or farther away, urging them to circle monuments or travel back and forth between one and another, or inspiring them to make offerings. Viewing the sculptures involved the entire body in optic, haptic, and kinetic experiences.

Both the creation and reception of Maya sculptures were corporeal experiences involving multiple senses. With some stelae weighing as much as six tons, tremendous physical strength and technological aids were required to quarry, transport, erect, and carve them. Dedications of sculptures on period endings also would have engaged the bodies of ritual participants, who unwrapped the monuments, moved around them, scattered copal, let blood, lit fires, chanted, sang, and danced. The sights, sounds, smells, and heat of the dedication rites would have stimulated the bodies and senses of performers and witnesses.

Whether carved or plain, stelae fundamentally reflected the human body, for their proportions recalled the human form. Furthermore, bodies—especially those of rulers—were the most common subject of stela imagery, and Stuart and Houston argue convincingly that stelae were vital embodiments of the rulers, and that portions of the rulers’ souls were perceived to occupy the stones (Stuart 1996; Houston and Stuart 1998). Once planted in platforms or plaza floors, stelae towered over supplicants.

Altars likewise encouraged corporeal engagement. Whereas stelae loom upward, altars open forward and invite people to place offerings on them, as the seated sajal does on El Cayo Altar 4. In contrast to the El Cayo depiction, the tabletops of Piedras Negras monumental altars were at a height more appropriate for making offerings while standing (see figs. I.8, 2.23). Although stelae and altars differed, both types of sculptures at Piedras Negras urged circumambulation. The completion of this processional form was undoubtedly an essential part of the renewal ceremonies during which sculptures were dedicated, ritually activated, and animated.

Moving around these sculptures would allow people to recite texts and see the interactions of the depicted figures and the three-dimensional illusions carved on multiple faces of the stone blocks. Such perception required movement and thus was

Dependent on the temporality of that movement. Alex Potts has theorized kinesthetic viewing and the temporality of experience for three-dimensional sculptures in the Western tradition, in which the viewing of a sculpture is “a process unfolding over time” (Potts 2000:8-9). For the Maya at Piedras Negras in the Late Classic period, viewing of stelae and altars most certainly unfolded over time. But this was not simply an effect of their existence as three-dimensional objects. Instead, the temporality of the experience was fundamental to their very essence and their establishment as sacred objects made to commemorate time and renew the world. Indeed, the sculptures invited the movement necessary for their activation during the course of a rite unfolding in time.

In addition, sculptures’ physical contexts in relation to other sculptures and buildings were crucial aspects of their existence and activation. Their placements and associations inspired and required movement, such that the viewing or experience of multiple sculptures together also unfolded over time. Installing monuments in physical orientations created opportunities for dialogue among monuments and consequently among the entities they embodied. These orientations—along with emulation and other visual references—guided people to make connections to other sculptures and create discourse at their intersections. The temporality of these processions and performances also was a fundamental aspect of their meaning and was analogous to the journey through time that both separated and connected successive rulers in the dynasty. Indeed, the dynasts were temporally and physically distinct, but movement, ceremony, and performance—all acts that had to unfold in time—could connect them and their sculptural embodiments.

Architectural contexts also guided interaction with sculptures. Buildings provided dramatic backdrops and sacred references, for many of them were ancestors’ funerary pyramids. Particular placements of sculptures resulted in different visual perspectives according to one’s access to certain spaces. Monuments inhabited and responded to socially and ceremonially charged spaces, their images at times acknowledging and making these conditions explicit. But as animated entities, they also created charged spaces and transformed the space around them.

These monuments changed over time, particularly as they persisted over the centuries while historical, physical, and social contexts changed around them. Made to embody living rulers, they came to embody ancestors and continued to hold potency or some aspect of the vital essence, or k’uh, that had been imbued in them. In addition, they triggered memory and functioned as loci for making contact with the past and with sacred ancestors, who were a fundamental part of the present.

But how can we understand the power of these monuments? What does it mean to say that an object has agency or can influence how people perceived or interacted with them? For the ancient Maya and other civilizations (ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, and medieval India, for example), rites of dedication, establishment, and animation invite divine forces to enter into an object. Once these forces enter objects, people may treat them like persons or divinities and consider them imbued with characteristics of living entities. Consequently, the objects have power over people and guide how they are treated. Regarding this process for Egyptian cult images, Meskell (2004:253-54) writes that “material objects, made by human hands, thus transcend their makers, albeit through human intentionality and artifice.”

The potency of ancient Maya sculptures may have resulted from the perception that they were imbued with a life force that entered them during their activation and remained in them. But their agency may also have derived from their position in a network of social relations. In his relational explanation of the social agency of objects, Alfred Gell (1998:122-23) explains that objects may have agency because they are extensions of the persons who made or used them. The agency of Maya sculptures, then, may have resulted from their connections to particular ancestors, with the objects retaining a link to the person or persons who commissioned them or interacted with them at an earlier time.

Whether because of their animation, their links to ancestors in a network of social relations, or both, the objects became empowered, and in a sense they became more powerful than their creators. Moreover, they influenced the later reception of those sculptures and subsequent creation of new sculptures. The Maya at Piedras Negras left most older monuments standing in significant locations, and they buried others inside Maya buildings, at times as offerings to those buildings. New monuments emulated older ones and were placed in relation to them. The form and placement of the older sculptures thus guided newer sculptural creations and people’s behavior in relation to them.

The significance of this emulation and these alignments becomes clearer over time as later sculptures not only continued in this tradition but also responded to the very conditions of emulation and people’s experience of sculptural conventions. One telling example is Piedras Negras Stela 14, from circa 761 ce. Its form, imagery, and location acknowledged and responded to Structure O-13’s participation in the processional circuit. Stela 14 was installed on the building’s lower terrace. In the image on the stela, Yo’nal Ahk Ill’s mother, facing to the right, is positioned as witness in front of the enthroned ruler, situated as if she had just traversed the processional route from the West Group Plaza (see plate 3, figs. 3.23, 3.25, 3.26). Her carved form obscures the details of the adorned scaffold that supports the ruler, but the scaffold is understood to be behind her—out of sight but present. Moreover, the scaffold was visible on stelae from earlier rulers that Stela 14 emulated; those stelae remained standing in the West and South groups and were available for visitation along the causeways.

The perceived potency of older sculptures at Piedras Negras is further demonstrated in the fact that the Maya physically moved and manipulated older sculptures, particularly on Structure O-13, as well as on buildings at other Maya sites.1 Evidence indicates that the Maya reused sculptures for the purpose of venerating ancestors, shaping historical discourse, and performing memory. It is clear that the Maya considered these older sculptures to be sacred and powerful, yet they also used them to narrate stories, both within objects’ texts and images and across objects.

There is also evidence for renewal and recalibration in these histories as new rulers acceded, dedicated sculptures, created new buildings, and transformed the built environment. Each ruler redirected historical narratives to lead to his own present, and it is clear that some rulers used the opportunity to smooth over ruptures and conflicts in the historical narratives and to create displays of apparent continuity.

The physical forms, content, and compositions of Piedras Negras sculptures and buildings from the second half of the eighth century and their relation to processional

Causeways and the landscape are indicators of the meaningful practice of the performances associated with them. Moreover, they reveal that for the Late Classic Maya at Piedras Negras, history and memory were imbued in sculptures and buildings and were mapped onto the built environment and the landscape. This is made explicit both in Stela 14 and in the reuse of sculptures on Structure O-13.

It is also made explicit in the transformation of Structure O-13, located on the East Group Plaza, into a place for historical revision and for the commemoration and veneration of ancestors from the polity’s long history, beginning with the early sixth-century Yat Ahk I. This building likely was chosen as Itzam K’an Ahk Il’s burial place and made into a place for memory because it was located at the nexus of the processional causeways that connected the West and South groups, where ancestors’ remains and sculptural embodiments continued to be present. I suggest that the use of these causeways for the performance of memory contributed to the development of O-13 into a place for commemoration, and, furthermore, that processions and performances influenced the design of sculptures, buildings, and the site plan in the second half of the eighth century, if not before.

Yet this was not the only building that was a site of memory and for commemoration. Other funerary pyramids had their own histories of use and were transformed into places of memory—first for the ancestor who was buried in the building, and then for his descendant who installed monuments on the building. These transformations in building use created an actual and metaphorical layering of memory on and in the building. For example, excavations by Escobedo and Zamora (2001b:206) demonstrate that Structure R-5 existed in a previous iteration before it became K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s funerary pyramid.2 The interment of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I altered the building. Another modification occurred when Itzam K’an Ahk I installed his images and sculptural embodiments on the building. The building nevertheless retained a connection to K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I, for there were later commemorations of him in that place, as indicated by Panel 4’s pictorial and textual narrations. The changes to the building, therefore, did not completely transform it but added to it, and over time the building accumulated histories and potency.

For Piedras Negras Structure O-13, the importance of the place and its own material histories is clear. The perception of Structure O-13 as a site of memory is made explicit in the installation of stelae from multiple reigns on the building, in the performance and recounting of a ceremony commemorating Itzam K’an Ahk II on Panel 3, and in the reuse of objects in the service of reshaping narratives about the past.

The continued use of this building and others over time, with new versions built one on top of another, is characteristic of building reuse across the southern Maya lowlands in the Classic period. Mock (1998:11) has described the layering of buildings in this way as a layering of the souls of those buildings, such that the place accrued ancestral power as each layer was enveloped within the next. Maya buildings became transformed because of this practice. Yet it is not just that they grew larger, for of course they did, but that the structure comprised the layers—those materializations from the past—and thereby was saturated with memory.

Another example of a place in which the narrations and materials of the past coincided is Copan’s Temple 26. Extensive excavations have demonstrated that this pyramid contained layers of buildings, sculptures, and tombs from the fourth to

The eighth century (W Fash 2001, 2002; W Fash, B. Fash, and Davis-Salazar 2004; Stuart 2004b). Excavations and associated epigraphic studies have revealed that in the early eighth century, Ruler 12 (nicknamed “Smoke Imix”) was buried in this building, and his successor, Waxaklajuun Ubaah K’awiil, dedicated the first version of the Hieroglyphic Stairway. The text inscribed on the stairway provides a lengthy narration of the dynasty’s history and recounts the same span of time as the materials interred beneath it.

The narration about the past and the materials from that past thus were integrated in and on the same physical structure. The presence of the buried monuments, dynasts, and buildings from the beginning of the dynasty within the temple undoubtedly influenced the choice of this building both for Ruler 12’s tomb and for the dynastic chronicle. The sculptures and architectural layers buried within it physically constituted—and were the indexical remains of—the cycles of history that the text narrated. Temple 26, therefore, is a place where the ancient Maya engaged with their past through the creation of narrations and the handling of objects in an integrated manner. There, two different ways of accessing and shaping the past came together in one building and its life history (see O’Neil 2010). Furthermore, these narrations likely were performed in processions up the stairway that corresponded to movement through history, proceeding backward in time.

On buildings such as Copan Temple 26 or Piedras Negras Structure O-13, therefore, the Maya created new sculptures with narrations that acknowledged that the structure was a place of memory and for commemoration. These narrations may be complementary to the material remains that make up the structure, although as exemplified by Piedras Negras Structure O-13, these narratives could be modified.

For the ancient Maya at Piedras Negras, engaging with sculptures and engaging with history were intertwined. Nevertheless, this intertwining was not necessarily a part of the sculptures’ original use or the motivation for making and dedicating them. Instead, layers of meaning were added over time, and the sculptures and performances of them guided these transformations. Moreover, making and engaging with sculptures changed over time, not only because of conscious choice on the part of sculptors, rulers, or their advisers but also because of the agency of the objects that guided engagement and prescribed how future sculptures were made—for the older, still-vital sculptures had to be kept in dialogue. Moreover, regardless of the exact explanation we may reconstruct regarding uses and treatments of sculptures in relation to political, historical, and cultural contexts, the value and power that the Maya perceived in these sculptures—both in their preservation and in their destruction—are appreciably evident.